Nine people died and three others were injured in a fire that broke out in a three-storey building in outer Delhi’s Kirari. The Delhi Fire Services said that seven fire tenders were sent to the spot after they received information about the fire at 12.30 am.

The fire services officers also said that the blaze started on the ground floor which was used as a godown to store clothes. Police said they are verifying if the ground floor was being used as a small-scale factory.

This is the second major fire incident in the last two weeks. On December 8, a fire at a building in North Delhi’s Anaj Mandi killed 43 people.

In the latest case, the fire department said they reached the spot and found charred bodies of three people. There were nine others who had sustained burn injuries or fallen unconscious after fire spread to the upper floors of the building. They were all rushed to the Sanjay Gandhi hospital.

The fire services confirmed that nine people have died while others are in critical condition in the hospital. The police has identified eight of the deceased. They are: Ram Chandra Jha, Sundari Devi, Sandhu Jha, Uday Chaudhary, Muskan, Anjali, Adarsh, Tulsi while one woman remains unidentified.

Police suspect the fire may have started from the ground floor, and an explosion in an LPG cylinder escalated it leading to the several deaths. “There was only one staircase. The building did not have a fire safety clearance. The LPG cylinder was on the stairs of the second floor. It exploded causing damage to the building wall too,” a fire department official said.

It was finally brought under control at 3:50 am.