Windows ‘prised open’

Press, 25 January 1986, Page 10

Windows ‘prised open’

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi A British businessman, George Allen, said he escaped suffocation in New Delhi’s worst hotel fire because he and three colleagues had prised open locked windows with spanners a few days ago. Dootors said most of the 38 victims died of asphyxiation when the fire swept through the Siddharth Continental on Thursday. Other guests tried to knot bedsheets together, tie them to windows and escape, “but I found the fire escape,” Mr Allen said. Mr Douglas Bessey, an-

other British survivor, said: “I wrapped a wet towel around my head and groped my way through dark corridors to reach the fire escape.” A Soviet Embassy spokesman said a Soviet woman tourist was badly injured in a fall as she tried to slide to safety down a rope of knotted bedsheets from a fourth floor window. Guests fled their rooms in pyjamas, choking in the dark from black smoke as they rushed to fire escape stairwells, a Fire Department official said. About 185 people were occupying 135 of the Sid-

dharth’s 137 rooms, and 50 employees were on duty when the JHre started. The known dead in- - eluded two Australians, one American, threel Britons, two Japanese, a West German diplomat and his wife, an Argen- ' tine diplomat, an Iraqi and a Russian. The police yesterday filed preliminary charges of causing death by negligence against the management of the hotel. Police and hotel staff said the inferno might i have been caused by an electrical short circuit which set fire to the * banquet hall carpet