KOLKATA
\nA fierce fire ripped through a hotel in the Indian city of Kolkata killing at least 15 people, police said Wednesday, with some clambering out of windows and onto the rooftop to escape.
\nSeveral people were rescued from rooms and the roof of the budget hotel, Kolkata police chief Manoj Verma told AFP after the fire broke out on Tuesday evening.
\n\u201cThe hotel turned into a gas chamber and it appears that many people suffocated to death,\u201d said Verma, adding an investigation had been launched to determine the cause of the blaze.
\nThe Rituraj Hotel, which had 88 guests when the fire broke out, is located in a congested business district of central Kolkata. About a dozen people were burned and were undergoing treatment. A hotel worker told AFP that the fire broke out on the first floor of the six-storey building, where a bar was being built and where construction work had bricked up the windows. Building fires are common in India due to a lack of firefighting equipment and a routine disregard for safety regulations. Eyewitness Nanda Mondal, who runs a construction company, said he saw plastic panels covering the building that appeared to have \u201cfuelled the fire\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KOLKATA A fierce fire ripped through a hotel in the Indian city of Kolkata killing at least 15 people, police said Wednesday, with some clambering out of windows and onto the rooftop to escape. Several people were rescued from rooms and the roof of the budget hotel, Kolkata police chief Manoj Verma told AFP after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475717,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-475693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n