NBTC Building Fire Kills 49 Migrant Workers in Kuwait

Some 49 migrant workers employed by NBTC, a construction company in Kuwait, were killed in a fire that broke out on June 12 at a residential building leased by their employer, while another 50 were injured. Most of the workers were from India.

The fire broke out at 4am in the Mangaf neighborhood, a suburb of Kuwait city. Police investigations traced the fire to a short circuit in the security room. The fire caused smoke that spread quickly through the centralized air conditioning system of the seven story building suffocating many of the victims. Others died trying to escape by jumping out of the building windows. 

The company that employed the workers is Naser Mohamed Al-Baddah & Partner Trading and Contracting Company (NBTC) which was founded by KG Abraham, an engineer from Niranam village in Kerala, India, in 1977. It is co-owned by Mohamed N. Al-Baddah, the Kuwaiti chairman of the company.

NBTC works as a contractor for fossil fuel companies like the Kuwait National Petroleum Company and Kuwait Oil Company which operate oil and gas processing facilities near Mangaf. Over the last five decades the company has expanded to Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Like many companies in the Gulf region from Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates, NBTC relies on low wage migrant workers from other countries, who are sponsored for visas by their employer and housed in company accommodation from which they are bussed to work. The buildings that these workers are housed in often lack appropriate hygiene and safety measures – and the building that caught fire was no exception – it had 196 residents living in 24 flats in cramped and over crowded conditions.

"What happened today is a result of the greed of the company and building owners," Sheikh Fahad Al-Yousuf Al-Sabah, the deputy prime minister, who visited the scene of the fire told the media.  

Colonel Sayed Hassan Al-Mousawi, the director of the Fire Accident Investigation Department of Kuwait, told local media that the high number of deaths was a result of the closing of facades, the presence of partitions made out of highly flammable materials between rooms, and the closure of the building’s roof, which prevented many from escaping.

But Abraham denies the allegations. "Never, never,” he told a news conference. “There was no overcrowding. International law allows us to provide accommodation for four persons per room, or four cubic meters/person.”

"We have not done any wrong,” Abraham added. “We believe things did not happen because of our mistake. But, still, we will take the responsibility. We cannot say this is not our responsibility. They were working with us. They built our company. They are our family."

The company offered compensation of eight lakh rupees (approximately US$10,000) per victim plus four years salary to the families of the victims. NBTC also offered to give jobs to the next-of-kin.

Family members say that the compensation is not sufficient. “Even dependents of those killed by wild animals get more compensation," Pavithran M K, a cousin of K R Ranjith, one of the victims who grew up in Chengala village in Kerala, told Onmanorama, an online news portal. "Our state's economy runs on remittances from NRIs (non-resident Indians) but when something happens to us, we are left to to fend for ourselves.”

Some of the victims had worked abroad for decades like Muralidharan Nair from Kerala, who was about to retire after 32 years in Kuwait. “He came on leave in December for two months with a plan to end his career in Kuwait. The company called him back,” Vinu V Nair, his brother, told Al Jazeera.

Immediately after the fire, the Kuwaiti government acted swiftly to inspect a number of buildings for safety violations – and in the process evicted a number of workers from unsafe buildings. Many of these evictees ended up homeless, according to the New York Times, and some of these workers were fearful of being deported.

“These workers are disposable in nature,” said Manishankar Prasad, an independent labor researcher in Malaysia, told the New York Times. "There is no incentive for anybody to change the system. Because for each worker who is killed, there are 10 other people who’ll replace them within a day.”