2023-06-28 18:53:36
The minors “are a five-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy,” a member of the Fire Department told AFP.
Seven members of the same family, including two children, died this Wednesday (28) in the fire of their house in a central neighborhood of Havana, informed the Cuban authorities cited by the official press.
“A family consisting of seven people, five elderly people and two minors” died in the accident which, according to the first information, was caused “by a fire from electric mopeds” that were in the house, indicates the Cubadebate portal.
The minors “are a five-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy,” a member of the fire department told AFP, who preferred not to reveal his identity.
He indicated that emergency services arrived at the scene around 2:20 am (3:20 am GMT) and took more than an hour to bring the fire under control.
“When we arrived, the house was burning like a fire, there was nothing left,” he explained.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero regretted what happened and expressed their condolences to the families and friends of the victims.
According to Cubadebate, it is a house “of mixed construction, with masonry and wood structures inside” and, apparently, the fire started “by the explosion of the vehicles that were at the entrance to the room”.
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Firefighters later confirmed that the family had put the batteries of their two electric mopeds to charge in the living room of the house, and one of them had exploded, starting the fire.
“The neighbors’ screams woke me up, I jumped out of bed, but we couldn’t do anything, everything happened so fast,” Niovis Rodríguez, a 68-year-old neighbor, told AFP in a state of shock.
At least three fire trucks were mobilized, according to images released by the media.
Faced with the recurrent scarcity of gasoline, electric vehicles, mainly scooters and mopeds, are increasingly numerous in the Cuban capital.
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The press regularly reports on fires, often small ones, caused by exploding batteries.
© Agence France-Presse
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