Lankan maid informs police: Kuwaiti wedding tent fire suspect arrested

Manama: The first wife of the groom has been arrested on suspicion of setting on fire a wedding tent that killed dozens of women and children and injured dozens of others in Kuwait, according to a newspaper report on Monday.

The Kuwait Times and Al Qabas newspapers reported that the woman confessed to setting the tent on fire and that housemaids also said they saw the woman set the tent on fire using kerosene-soaked rags.

Al Qabas newspaper said the 23-year-old woman had told police she used petrol to torch the packed wedding tent to avenge her former husband’s “bad treatment” of her before their divorce.

A Sri Lankan woman, identified only as Salina, told the Director of Crime Scene Colonel Hammad AlـEnzi that she works as a domestic helper for a family in the area. She claimed to have seen a woman carrying a bottle full of gasoline with a lighter in the other hand. According to her, the said woman asked her to bring newspapers.

“I followed the woman and saw her throw the bottle of gasoline over the house,” the maid alleged.

Kuwait’s fire department chief on Monday raised the death toll to 43 after two of the victims who were hospitalised with severe burns died on Sunday.

The inferno ate up the women’s tent within just three minutes and left behind bodies so charred they were unrecognisable, Brigadier General Jassem Al Manouri added.

Fifty-two other injured in the blaze remained in hospital, the health minister, Hilal Al Sayer, told the state-owned Kuwait Television on Monday.

Meanwhile, Kuwaiti authorities have been able to identify 13 of the 41 victims who were killed in a blaze that gutted a large tent hosting the wedding ceremony. It was still unclear if the bride had survived