As of: March 16, 2024, 10:58 a.m
By: Julian Mayr
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A mother living alone and her three children fall victim to a house fire.
Only the cat can save itself.
Bologna – The residents of Via Bertocchi in Bologna are in shock.
On Friday night (March 15th) there was a house fire in an outskirts of the city in northern Italy.
Although, according to agency reports, the flames were not said to have reached devastating proportions, a tragedy occurred early on Friday morning: a mother (32) living alone and her three children aged six and two were killed.
There was a fatal apartment fire in Bologna on Friday night (March 15).
(Symbolic image) © JEAN MARC QUINET/Imago
Apartment fire in Bologna claims four victims – any help comes too late for the mother and her children
The fire department responded to the apartment fire around 1 a.m. after a neighbor notified the emergency services.
When the fire brigade reached the small apartment on the fourth floor of an apartment building, the rooms were said to be full of smoke, reports the daily newspaper
Corriere della Sera
.
The firefighters found the 32-year-old mother, her six-year-old daughter and the two-year-old twins all motionless in the shared bedroom.
As
Rai
reports, the children were already dead when the fire department arrived.
The 32-year-old mother of the family died on the way to the hospital.
She is said to have been near the window.
According to investigators, she apparently tried to open it.
“The way we found the bodies, we think she was trying to help the children,” police officer Luca Fiorini tells
Corriere della Sera
.
According to media reports, the family of four most likely succumbed to smoke or carbon monoxide poisoning.
Short circuit due to heater probably cause of fire in Bologna
The cause of the small fire, according to information from the Ansa news agency, was obviously a heating system: “The fire was most likely caused by an electrical system to which a heater was connected.
This caused a short circuit.
According to the fire department's initial investigations, it appears to be purely an accident," said deputy commissioner Pierluigi Pinto.
However, further investigations into the now confiscated apartment are ongoing.
Particularly explosive: According to information from
Corriere della Sera,
the mother only turned on the small heater in the bedroom that evening because the central heating in the apartment complex had failed.
“We don't know if [the heating] didn't work in the whole building, but on Thursday and in this apartment it definitely didn't work,” says the provincial commander of the Bologna fire department, Calogero Turturici, in the daily newspaper.
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Family father treated in hospital – only cat survived house fire
Together with the children's grandparents, the father of the family is said to have rushed to his former partner's apartment on the night of the incident.
The shock was probably too great.
He eventually had to be treated in hospital for feeling unwell.
According to Corriere della Sera,
the only thing that escaped the burning apartment was
the cat, which had been living with the family for a few weeks at the children's request.
A neighbor and witness to the operation, which lasted until five in the morning, described the residential area to the newspaper as “cursed”.
Almost exactly five years ago, two brothers died after falling from the eighth floor of the neighboring building.
In 2006, a mother and her young daughter died after jumping from the ninth floor.
In the summer of 2023, a fire in a retirement home in Milan killed at least six people.
Meanwhile, the holiday island of Sicily is also on fire.
Near Trapani in the west of the island, 350 hectares of a nature reserve burned down.