London inferno:
• Death toll expected to climb as firefighters trawl through smouldering residential block after the UK capital’s worst fire in many years
Fire engulfed a high-rise block in central London early on Wednesday morning, killing at least 12 people and injuring 74 others in an inferno that trapped sleeping residents.
Some screamed for help from behind upper floor windows and others tried to throw children to safety as flames raced through the high-rise Grenfell Tower block of apartments in the north Kensington area just before 1am.
Burning debris fell from the blazing building.
“We could see a lot of children and parents screaming ‘Help! Help! Help!’ and putting their hands on the window and asking to help them,” said witness Amina Sharif.
“We could do nothing. We could see the stuff on the side was falling off, collapsing. We were just standing screaming and they were screaming.”
Another witness, Saimar Lleshi, saw people tying sheets together sheets to improvise escape ropes. “I saw three people putting sheets together to climb down, but no one climbed down. I don’t know what happened to them.
“When the lights went off, people were waving with white shirts to be seen,” Lleshi said.
More than 200 firefighters, with 40 fire engines, fought for hours in an effort to bring the blaze, one of the biggest in central London in many years, under control.
By late afternoon, London police said 12 people had been killed and they warned that the death toll was likely to rise.
Police commander Stuart Cundy said the “recovery operation” could take some time and there could be people in the building still not accounted for, though he would not be drawn on a figure.
Firefighting crews still had to reach the top four floors of the building, where several hundred people live in 130 apartments.
The cause of the inferno, which reduced the tower block to a charred, smoking shell, was not immediately known.
The block had recently undergone an £8.7m refurbishment of the exterior, which included new external cladding and replacement windows.
Black smoke billowed high into the air for hours after the blaze broke out. Residents tried to escape through smoke-filled corridors after the smell of burning woke them. London Fire Brigade said the fire engulfed all floors from the second to the top of the 24storey block.
There were reports of residents leaping out of windows to escape the flames. One woman lost two of her six children as she tried to escape from the block, a witness said.
“I spoke to a lady who lives on the 21st floor. She has six kids. She left with all six of them. When she got downstairs, there were only four of them with her. Her heart is broken, said block resident Michael Paramasivan.
Other witnesses spoke of children including a baby being thrown to safety, from high up.
Witness Tamara told the BBC: “There’s people, like, throwing their kids out ‘crying] ‘Just save my children, just save my children.’”
Speaking to reporters, London Fire Brigade commissioner Dany Cotton said: “In my 29 years of being a firefighter, I have never ever seen anything of this scale.”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the fire raised questions about the safety of high-rise blocks such as Grenfell Tower.
The BBC reported that a political deal between the government of Prime Minister Theresa May and a small Northern Irish party could be delayed because of the fire.
The building was still smouldering more than 12 hours after the fire broke out. However, it was not thought to be in danger of collapse.
Firefighters rescued many people — some of them in their pyjamas — from the 43-year-old block, a low-rent housing estate that overlooks parts of the Kensington area.