Four people were killed and at least eight people, including foreign workers, were injured after a building that housed a restaurant collapsed Sunday morning in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, medical and security sources told AFP.
A Civil Defense source said the two-story building collapsed as a result of an explosion caused by a gas leak at the Layla Restaurant, which appeared to be empty at this time of day, in the Jadriya area of the city’s inner city. Baghdad.
Civil defense units began a rescue operation after the collapse of the building, as a result of which several people who were inside were under the rubble for several hours.
A police source told AFP that “four people died and eight were injured, including workers from Bangladesh” in the accident.
A medical source confirmed that the hospital accepted the bodies of four people and treated the wounded.
According to an AFP photographer, the explosion caused the entire building to collapse, blocking the exit of workers from the building’s basement, which is used as a kitchen.
And in social networks there were photos of the complete collapse of the building.
Most buildings in Baghdad, with a population of around ten million people, lack security measures, causing accidents and loss of life when they occur, while large commercial centers in Baghdad witness fires that sometimes result in injury in addition to great property loss. .
Last year, about 150 people died in two hospital fires, one in the south and another near the capital, exacerbated by a lack of necessary security measures.
For more than forty years, Iraq has witnessed successive wars and crises affecting its infrastructure that is not maintained, while Iraqis suffer from a lack of basic services such as electricity and water, in a crisis exacerbated by corruption and mismanagement, against which October, thousands of people revolted. 2019.
