Grenfell: The wait goes on

JUST five Grenfell Tower families have moved into permanent new homes, 100 days after the disaster.

There are 41 in temporary homes and 153 in hotels, said the Grenfell response team. Some 48 had accepted a permanent place but not yet moved in.

The taskforce said: “We will only work at the pace that each family feels comfortable with.”

Bellal El Guenuni will never stop reliving the early hours of Wednesday June 14. That morning, he lost friends, neighbours, everything he had ever owned, and feared he had lost his family.

Somehow, his pregnant wife led all three of their children – aged 11, eight and three – to safety.

Overcome by smoke, they were taken to two hospitals. Bellal’s wife was in a coma for three weeks, two of their children were also in comas for a fortnight, and the youngest was treated in hospital.

That all four survived, and the unborn baby too, Bellal can only ascribe to fate.

“I was away and I rang my wife because I thought she might have been up late because of Ramadan,” the 30-year-old caterer says.

His 29-year-old wife was asleep and Bellal had apologised for waking her – but it meant she was awake when the fire had started at just after 1am.

The family escaped from the tower at 3.15am, among the very last people to make it out with their lives.

Today, as the Grenfell community marks 100 days since the fire Bellal, his now heavily pregnant wife and three traumatised children are still in a hotel room, and still looking for someone to take responsibility. “You have to remember this has been going on for years,” Bellal says quietly. “It was total neglect. They didn’t care about us.

“We were like third class citizens in the middle of that borough. They just hid us away and forgot about us. We are fed up of being let down, the lies. Someone needs to go to prison. We want justice.”

Bellal’s wife, who has asked not to be named in this piece as she recovers from her ordeal, was born in Grenfell Tower.

Bellal grew up near by and lived in the tower for 10 years. His grandfather came over from Morocco in the 1960s.

Bellal says he can’t thank the NHS or firefighters enough for saving his family’s lives. His wife was at the Royal Free Hospital where youngest Ayeesha, three, was also treated. Their other daughter Naila, 11, and son Aymen, eight, were in King’s College children’s hospital, South