An 85-year-old woman living in North-East Delhi’s Gamri passed away due to suffocation after a group of people put her house on fire.
Identified as Akbari, her body now lies at the GTB hospital as her family members wait for a postmortem.
Akbari’s son Mohammed Saeed Salmani was out to buy grocery when a mob of around 100 people gathered in the lane where their house was located.
That is when he received a call from his younger son, who informed him about the fire.
He rushed back to the spot but the flames were too strong by then, and he had to wait for them to be controlled.
Speaking to Scroll about the incident, Salmani accepted that he thought his family won’t survive.
They told me it was too dangerous, I could be killed, and I should just wait because what’s happened has already happened. I was stuck for hours, thinking that my family was dead the whole time.
Though most of his family members survived the fire, his old mother, who was trapped on the upper floor of the house, passed away due to suffocation.
A report from NDTV quoted him as saying:
My mother was on the upper floor and got trapped. I could not go inside as people said they will kill me too. I am sure she must have screamed for help…No one could here to help. She died of suffocation.
And while he endures the grief of that loss, he has other things to take care of as well. The fire claimed his tailoring workshop and close to 8 lakh rupees were stolen from his house.
Salmani wants his mother’s last rites to be performed in their village in Meerut.