Terrifying footage shows a man scrambling onto the roof of a burning house following a fire which killed three children.
On Saturday morning, a blaze ripped through a home in East Ham, east London, killing one child at the scene. A second died later that night, and a third was today announced to have died in hospital. All three are understood to be siblings and a fourth is still receiving treatment, a friend of the family told the Mirror. Their mother remains in hospital under sedation, a friend said.
The video shows the moment a man, believed to be the father, wrestled his way out of the loft and onto the rooftop. Neighbour and friend Rida Nawaz, 28, then broke a downstairs window of the house with her son’s hoverboard as the community desperately tried to rescue the family.
“The mother is still asleep,” Rida said. “They’ve given her medicine to sleep. The father is in hospital and he is OK. He is with her. She does not know everything about the children yet. She’s my best friend and the third child who passed away yesterday visited to play with my kids.”
The three children who have died were a boy aged eight, a girl aged 11 and a second boy aged 12, Rida said, adding the older sibling is aged 14. “It’s like a bad dream,” she added. “We think we’re about to wake up. We can still hear the kids’ voices, the noises. We wanted to save them and we tried but we could not. We broke the windows and there was so much smoke coming out.”