Anaj Mandi blaze kills 43: Delhi inferno second worst fire to hit National Capital after 1997 Uphaar Cinema tragedy

New Delhi: The Anaj Mandi inferno that killed at least 43 people on Sunday morning is the second most severe fire in the national capital after the Uphaar Cinema tragedy that claimed 59 lives and left over 100 injured.

The theatre in the posh Green Park area was screening the film Border and several families were there to catch the Sunny Deol-starer on its release day June 13, 1997.

But the movie outing turned into mayhem as a massive blaze broke out during the 3 pm show.

“This is perhaps the biggest tragedy of this nature after the Uphaar mishap,” Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri told reporters at the Lady Hardinge Medical College, where he met the victim’s families.

Fourteen years after the Uphaar tragedy, a fire broke at a meeting organised for transgenders in Nand Nagri where almost 10,000 people had gathered, leaving 14 people dead and almost 30 injured.

In July 2017, tragedy struck a four-storey building in Dilshad Garden area where four members of a family, including two children, died due to asphyxiation and two others were injured while trying to escape from an early morning blaze.

The family had celebrated the birthday of their 12-year-old daughter a day before the tragedy.

The girl was killed while she was trying to escape with her father, grandfather and younger brother.

The next year, another massive fire ripped through a firecracker storage unit in Bawana that left 17 people, including 10 women, dead.

In the same year, two separate fires in northwest Delhi’s Kohat Enclave and Shahdara’s Mansarovar Park, claimed five lives, including that of three minors.

In April 2018, a fire broke out at a building in Kohat Enclave, killing a couple and their two children. Few days later, a major fire gutted 300 shanties in Shahdara and killed a girl.

In February this year, a massive fire swept through a four-floor hotel in central Delhi’s Karol Bagh in the early hours, killing at least 17 guests, including two people who jumped off the building in a desperate bid to save themselves.

In August, six people, including three children, died and 13 were injured in a massive fire at a building in southeast Delhi’s Zakir Nagar area due to a short circuit in early morning.