Cairo: A midnight fire had ripped through a house in south-western Saudi Arabia, killing four children of one family, a relative has said.
The blaze had erupted in the house in the Sarat Ubaida governorate part of the Assir province shortly after the family went to sleep, according to a cousin of the family head.
“As soon as my cousin and his family comprising four boys and five girls went to sleep in their house, he was awakened by the fire in the room of the four boys,” Saudi news portal Sabq quoted the cousin Ali bin Mohammed as saying.
The father, a school guard, managed to save his five daughters and wife, while three boys died at the site and the fourth passed away later at the hospital.
The cause of the fire was not clear.
Last July, four other children died after a fire had broken out while they were asleep in their house in Al Ahsa in eastern Saudi Arabia.
The blaze, attributed to an electrical short circuit, started on the ground floor and soon spread to the second where the children were sleeping while their parents were outside the place.
In September, three people of one family died in a fire in their house in north-western Saudi Arabia.
Four others were hospitalised with injuries from the blaze in Haql governorate in the Tabuk province, the Saudi civil defence said at the time. The dead were the family’s head, his wife and one of their children due to suffocation from inhalation of smoke, according to media reports.
