Cairo: Seven members of a family, including six children, were killed in a blaze that swept through a house in northern Saudi Arabia, local media reported.
Civil defence teams managed to put out the blaze that had erupted at dawn on Tuesday in the one-floor house in the district of Al Tasheelat in Al Qurayyat governorate, a local official has said.
In the aftermath, four bodies of three children and a man, were found in the house, spokesman for the civil defence service Captain Abdulrahman Abdulaziz said.
Four other residents were hospitalised in critical condition. Three of them later died due to wounds and suffocation caused by the fire.
“Initial inspection showed that the fire happened inside a room used as a bedroom for children on the ground floor of the house where bodies of the children were found,” the official said.
He urged people to install smoke detectors inside houses, pointing out that the device plays a major role in detecting the fire before it worsens and causes casualties.
He did not give a breakdown of the victims, or the cause of the blaze.
But, the dead were identified as the father and his six children including four sons and two daughters, Saudi news portal Akhbaar24 reported.
Their mother is now lying at Al Qurayyat Public Hospital in critical condition.
The fire had been sparked by an oil heater inside the children’s room, according to the report.
