More than 200 firefighters raced against time to tackle the fire which engulfed the 24-story Grenfell Tower in North Kensington Area leaving 74 others injured.<\/p>\n
Commander Stuart Cundy, from the Metropolitan Police, confirmed at least 12 deaths but said this figure “will sadly increase”.<\/p>\n
A \u201ccomplex recovery operation\u201d was expected over the next few days, he added.<\/p>\n
Emergency services said 74 people were in various hospitals; 20 of them were in critical condition.<\/p>\n
The fire started at around 1 a.m. local time and is believed to have taken hold of the whole building, which contained 120 apartments.<\/p>\n
“It is likely to take some time before we are in a position to confirm the identity of the victims and it is too early to speculate on the cause of the fire,” the Metropolitan Police added.<\/p>\n\n
Describing the fire earlier as “an unprecedented incident,” London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton said: “In my 29 years of being a firefighter, I have never ever seen anything on this scale.”<\/p>\n
A search-and-rescue operation is ongoing as the fire has been mostly brought under control.<\/p>\n
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said hundreds members of the emergency services were dealing with the situation, and described the fire as a “major incident”.<\/p>\n
Deniz Candas, a Turk who lives in the area told Anadolu Agency that there were some Turks who lived in the Grenfell Tower.<\/p>\n
He said he knew a family who lived in the block but did not hear anything from them.<\/p>\n
Tariq Gotteeh, a resident of the block said he was one of the first who had noticed the fire.<\/p>\n
He said: “I was up for the suhoor. I was taking the rubbish out. I felt a strange smell… I checked around and saw the flames.”<\/p>\n
The area has been cordoned off and adjacent properties evacuated with nearby roads closed to traffic.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Kensington Council has introduced emergency accommodation plans with hundreds of stranded families being offered accommodation for the night in a local gym.<\/p>\n\n
Anadolu Agency<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The death toll in a massive blaze which destroyed a residential tower block in London on Wednesday morning has climbed to 12, police said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,118,14],"tags":[10707,966,7831],"class_list":["post-58995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-hot","category-world","tag-fire","tag-london","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}