JEDDAH, 23 December 2006 — An African woman and her four children who were squatting in a vacant house with no electricity perished in a fire yesterday morning in Jeddah’s centrally located Bani Malik district. The three daughters and one son were below the age of 15.
According to Brig. Mohammed Al-Garni, acting head of Jeddah Civil Defense, the fire was accidental and caused by the accumulation of flammable items that had been stored in the small house.
“The house became an oven from the inside because of the mass storage of garbage,” said Al-Garni.
The woman was reportedly one of Jeddah’s ubiquitous African “bin ladies”, as they are called, who scour for recyclable materials out of the city’s orange garbage receptacles.
The house, which had been empty until the woman and her children moved in, was piled high with stacks of collapsed cardboard boxes, old clothes and other materials salvaged from trash bins.
Ahmad Sadik, an Egyptian living in the neighborhood, said that the woman was a single mother and had been living in the vacant house for a while with her four children.
“I don’t know how they moved around inside the house or where they slept with all that garbage around,” said Sadik, who speculated that the women might have been cooking in the house when the garbage caught fire.
“Maybe those poor people couldn’t run to safety with all that stuff crammed into the house.”
