Nov 10, 2022: In the early hours of Thursday, a fire broke out in a garage through cramped quarters of foreign workers in Male, the capital of the Maldives, claimed the lives of at least 10 individuals, 9 of whom were Indians, and several others were seriously injured.
“We have found 10 bodies from the upper floor of a building destroyed in the fire, which originated from a ground-floor vehicle repair garage” a fire service official said, adding that it took them about four hours to extinguish the fire.
A security official said that another person killed in the incident was a Bangladeshi national.
Maldivian political parties have criticized the working conditions for foreigners.
They are estimated to make up approximately half of Male’s 250,000 inhabitants and are primarily from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Their substandard living conditions were highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the infection spread three times faster among foreign workers than among locals.
