Muscat: Two were killed, including 10-year-old boy and a housemaid after the family house was engulfed in a fire in Mabala area of Seeb province in the early hours of Monday morning.
Four other family members were injured in the blaze, according to the Public Authority for Civil Defence and Ambulance (PACDA).
The family was asleep when the fire erupted around 3.23am.
One of the neighbours reported the incident to the Civil Defence. Personnel at the PACDA rushed to the scene and it took them two hours to douse the fire.
An official at the PACA told Gulf News that the boy and the housemaid had died due to burns and smoke inhalation. The father, mother and two daughters sustained burn injuries.
The cause of the fire is being investigated.
A case of fire is reported every three hours in the country and 23 per cent of them from residential areas, according to the National Centre for Information and Statistics (NCIS). Most of the fire incidents are caused by faulty, counterfeit or ageing electrical items including cables, according to the PACDA.
In October, a seven-year-old Omani boy and his six-year-old sister were killed when their house caught fire in Barka province, 69km away from the capital Muscat. The siblings were asphyxiated in the smoke that engulfed their house.
In June 2015, a 22-year-old woman and her two-month-old baby daughter died in a fire that started in the kitchen in the North Mabala area of Seeb province. The mother and baby were in a bedroom when the fire broke out. Both died of smoke inhalation.
In 2013, an Omani family, including two children, died of smoke inhalation in a fire at their home in Muscat.
