Wife and children’s death in ‘worst London fire for decade’
A father whose wife and five children were killed in a house fire which started behind a chest freezer, tells an inquest how he braved flames and smoke as he tried to rescue them.
Bassam Kua described how he ran up and down the stairs in a “blind panic” searching for them in what has been described as the worst house fire in London for more than a decade.
He and his family were asleep when the fire broke out in the early hours of the morning at their home in Neasden.
The 52-year-old and his daughter Nur, 17, managed to escape. But his wife Muna Elmufatish and their daughters Hanin, 14, Basma, 13, Amal, nine, and sons Mustafa, five, and Yehya, two, died.
Coroner Andrew Walker read out a statement written by Mr Kua in the days after the fire, which started behind a chest freezer in the hallway of the four-bedroom, semi-detached house.
“I remember hearing an explosion or a loud bang. I was in a blind panic. I went upstairs to try to find my family, but I couldn’t.” Bassam Kua
Mr Kua stood in the witness box as the coroner described what happened. Mr Walker said Mr Kua was woken by his wife while the smoke alarm was going off.
‘Thick black smoke’
Battling through “thick black smoke”, the couple ran downstairs. “I felt my way around the room by feeling with my hand. She shouted that the fire was at the back of the freezer.”
In the statement, Mr Kua said he shouted at Muna to get the children while he would try to douse the flames with water. “The flames were higher than my head. I then thought it was better to use the garden hose.”
Mr Kua said he went outside where he saw a neighbour standing in his garden, who called out to say his daughter was there. “I saw my daughter Nur, who was 16,” he said. “I thought she must have jumped from her bedroom window. I saw blood on the side of her head.
“I pulled her two or three metres to the side of the garden in case any one else jumped from the window.”
Mr Kua said the garden hose was “useless” and he decided to try to go back upstairs to rescue his family. “I didn’t care about the fire, I just wanted to get the children out. I was shouting for my wife, but she didn’t answer.”
He said he went back into the house to search for his wife and children, but had to feel around with his hands because he could no longer see.
‘Blind panic’
“I remember hearing an explosion or a loud bang. I was in a blind panic. I went upstairs to try to find my family, but I couldn’t. I think I repeated the process of running up and down and out of the house about four or five times.”
Mr Kua said that when the emergency services arrived he was in such a panic that he refused medical treatment.
“I saw the fire brigade bringing out my son Mustafa, who was five years old. I saw them pushing down on his chest trying to save him. I told them the others were upstairs, and where were their ladders?
“I kept asking about Mustafa, and after about 10 minutes or so they said Mustafa was dead.”
Degraded capacitor
Andrew Vaughan-Davies, an investigator for the London Fire Brigade, told the inquest a degraded capacitor, a component used in various electrical appliances, was the likely cause of the fire.
He said a part of the capacitor, made of polypropylene, could have degraded over time, and the electrical current running into it from the mains would have caused it to heat up to and become “like molten lava”.
Mr Vaughan-Davies said the insulation foam of fridge-freezers was highly flammable and could be “catastrophic” if a fire reached it – “.. the equivalent of having a bonfire in your home”.
He told the inquest the London Fire Brigade had found defective fridges, freezers and fridge-freezers had caused 191 fires in the last two years.
Post-mortem examinations found that the six victims died from inhalation of fumes during the fire in September 2011.