At least 25 people died in the fire that ravaged a hotel-casino in Cambodia on the night of December 28 to 29. A vast rescue operation resumed on Friday, December 30, with the fear of finding new dead bodies on this site where several hundred customers and employees were at the time of the tragedy.
“It’s a tragedy in this holiday season”Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen reacted on Friday from Kampot, in the south of the country. “We continue this morning to search for victims. There could be more bodies”he added, stating that “more than 1,000 customers and around 500 employees” were at Grand Diamond City when the fire broke out.
The burnt down hotel-casino is located in Poipet, a Cambodian town on the border with Thailand. The toll has continued to worsen since Thursday, with twenty-five bodies already found, according to the latest report reported to Agence France-Presse (AFP) by Sek Sokhom, representative of the province of Banteay Mean Chey.
“Unsafe place”
Cambodian police and military, Cambodian and Thai rescuers… Hundreds of rescuers were busy at dawn on Friday around the imposing complex, of which only sections of the facades blackened by flames remain. The search is now extending to certain areas that were inaccessible the day before due to smoke, Jakkapong Ruengdech, one of the leaders of a Thai rescue team, told AFP.
Footage taken at the time of the blaze showed people cornered on balconies or window sills to escape meter-high flames. A Thai rescuer told AFP that the fire quickly spread through the hotel-casino due to the presence of carpet.
“I had the feeling from the beginning that this place was not well secured. Everything inside was old”, Nueng, a Thai employee of the hotel-casino, told AFP, who is awaiting news of his father trapped in the flames. The Cambodian authorities have not yet mentioned the causes of the fire.
Thirteen seriously injured were being treated Thursday in Thai hospitals near the border, according to authorities in Sa Kaeo province.
200 meters from Thailand
The Grand Diamond City is about 200 meters from the border post, on the busy road that connects the Thai capital Bangkok to Siem Reap, a Cambodian tourist town known for the nearby Angkor temples.
The law prohibits citizens of Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in Asia, from gambling in casinos, but many foreign casinos have sprung up in border towns, such as Poipet, where flocks a mainly Thai clientele. Casinos are officially banned in Thailand, prompting players to go to Cambodia.
In recent months, several deadly fires in night establishments, regularly suspected of not respecting basic safety rules, have broken out in Southeast Asia.
In August, a fire at a nightclub near Pattaya, Thailand, left 26 people dead, mostly young locals who had come to party. A month later, 32 people were killed in a karaoke bar fire in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.