They fought for 3 hours to open the door

3 children, 4 women killed in a fire at a shop-cum-residential complex in Gwalior

Seven members of two families in a posh area in Gwalior on Monday waged a battle of their life to save each other till the inferno that engulfed their houses devoured them.

The deceased included a four-year-old girl, a ten-year-old boy, and a 13-year-old girl.

As the fire tragedy in Indarganj area left the people in the ancient city shellshocked, the valour of four women and three minors who fought till their last breath became the talk of the town.

“I learnt about fire only after I noticed the burning curtain behind me. I then discovered that the paint containers caught fire which spread in no time”, Hari Om Goyal, one of the survivors in the tragedy said.

He was opening his shop located in the ground floor of the three-storied building that caught fire, when the tragedy occurred.

The smoke billowing from the gutted shop soon engulfed two of three houses in the complex in no time.

“The fire spread to two out of three houses in the complex catching 16 inmates of two families unawares. The family members ran helterskelter in their houses looking for exit routes to escape.

They broke open the doors one after another with a lot of effort but encountered fire at each exit route”, a family member recounted.

Four women succeeded in breaking open a door of a house to enter into a big hall. Later, they rescued three minors who were trapped in another room and carried them to the hall.

All of them then tried to find an exit route in the hall to escape the fire that had already engulfed the room and attempted unsuccessfully to break open the window.

They struggled for three hours to break the door leading to balcony to alert people outside to rescue them.

All of them were found dead in the big hall which proved their death trap, an eyewitness Pavan Raghuvamsi said.

Later, locals climbed the balcony after the fire was extinguished by the fire brigade which was pressed into service by the local administration, and broke open the door to find the deceased in the hall.

The fire brigade personnel rescued 11 other members of the two families by breaking a wall on one side of the building.

“The fire spread in no time giving hardly any chance to the deceased to escape,” Pankaj Tyagi, incharge of Indarganj police station said.