THE 13 Filipino women who were killed in the Capitol Hotel fire in Erbil, Iraq have been identified and the government is now in the process of informing their loved ones, Philippine Embassy officials said Monday.
“The victims, all females, were suffocated by the smoke while trying to find their way out in the darkness,” said charge d’affaires Elmer Cato, who flew to Erbil in a United Nations transport hours after the fire.
“We have already identified all the Filipino victims. Right now, we’re in the process of notifying their next of kin,” Cato said.
He said initial reports said there were 14 Filipinos killed in the fire, but Cato explained that Iraqi officials in Kurdistan mistakently identified one of the 21 fatalities as a Filipina.
The Philippine government has placed most of Iraq under Alert Level 4, which calls for mandatory repatriation. Kurdistan, however, remains only under Alert Level 1 due to a more “stable security situation,” he said.
“Now for the hard part: Conveying the sad news to loved ones,” Cato said from the Rizgary Hospital where the bodies of the victims were brought.
Officials of the Kurdistan Regional Government has already ruled out terrorism as the cause of the tragedy and blamed faulty wiring as the immediate cause of the fire at the basement level of the hotel where the Filipinos were working.
The government had said shortly after the fire that the victims’ families should wait for a while because the DFA has just dispatched the people who will facilitate the repatriation on Saturday.
There are some 1,000 Filipinos in Kurdistan, mostly hotel and restaurant workers, with some engineers and nurses, Cato said.
Nawzad Hadi, the governor of Arbil province, said preliminary information indicated that the cause of the fire was an electrical problem in a sauna.
Photos and video posted on social media showed dark grey smoke pouring from windows on the top floor of the building.
The Kurdistan region in north Iraq has largely been spared the deadly violence that plagues other parts of the country.
The region is frequently visited by tourists from other areas of Iraq and various countries in the region.
A hotel fire in Sulaimaniyah, another city in Iraqi Kurdistan, killed 30 people in July 2010.
The city’s hospital said people from 12 different nations died in that fire, including some who jumped to their deaths from upper-floor windows while trying to escape the flames.
In 2012, the Philippine government lifted a ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Kurdistan amid growing foreign labor demand, but the ban remains enforced in other parts of war-torn Iraq.