Cairo: Two women were killed after a fire ripped through a house in Kuwait, firefighting authorities have said.
The blaze had erupted in the house in the Al Adan area in the Mubarak Al Kabeer governorate, south of the capital Kuwait City.
The Kuwait Fire Service said firefighting brigades had dealt with the incident and brought it under control. They also rescued six people and evacuated them to safety. The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear.
In another incident, firefighters were able to control a blaze that had broken out at the artificial intelligence laboratory at Al Shaddadiya University in Al Shaddadiya area in Al Farwaniya governorate, also south of Kuwait City.
No casualties resulted from that fire, the cause of which was not immediately clear.
In June, a blaze swept across a residential building in Mangaf area, south of Kuwait City, leaving 50 people dead in one of the worst such incidents in Kuwait. The fatalities included 45 Indians and three Filipinos.
Fire Force investigators attributed the blaze to a short electric circuit, saying it started around dawn in the room of the building guard before it spread across the six-floor residence.
The high death toll was due to inflammable partitions separating apartments and rooms on the building as well as to the closure of its rooftop, making it difficult for the residents to escape from the fire, officials said.
Firefighting authorities in Kuwait said they had handled a total of 1,476 fires over the first six months of this year.
They included 354 fires in residential places, spokesman for the fire service Brig Mohammed Al Gharib told Kuwaiti newspaper Al Anba.
Among Kuwait's six governorates, Farwaniya topped the list with 259 fires, followed by Al Ahmadi governorate with 233 while the capital governorate ranked the third with 231 during the cited period.
The official said firm measures enforced by the fire service had helped reduce incidents in industrial sites and buildings under construction.
According to him, in the first half of this year, the Fire Prevention Sector closed 345 administrative facilities in the six governorates of Kuwait for failing to comply with safety requirements.
