Over MVR 2 milllion (US$128,700) worth of damage has been predicted by the owners of ‘Parkway 3’ shop, after a fire damaged the building on Saturday (March 9).
Director of Golden Lane – the company that operates Parkway 3 – Abdulla Saeed told local media that the fire had damaged the interior of the building and large quantities of furniture.
“The ground and first floors are used as a show room. The fire ignited in a store room on the first floor. Nobody accesses that area.
“That’s where the fire ignited and the first floor sustained some damages, the fire caused large damages to the building too. The ceiling was also burned,” Saeed told SunOnline.
Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) firefighters attended the scene on Saturday, extinguishing the fire around 4.00pm.
Saeed said that attempts by MNDF to extinguish the fire meant that the area had to be hose with large amounts of water, which had then caused water to drip down onto the furniture placed below the ground floor.
The MNDF were reported by local media to have geared up two ‘known’ activists of the government-aligned Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) with gas masks and oxygen tanks at one point, before leading them into the burned building.
One of the affected offices, according to local media, had been used by PPM in previous instances, and had also been used by the former PPM deputy leader for his own personal business.
According to Sun Online, the two PPM activists went inside the building to retrieve some ‘very important objects’, but it was not clear what those objects were.
Do you people not have fire investigation teams? This is stupidity to allow objects to be removed from the incident and even greater stupidity to allow the owners to enter the property until full facts of how the fire started are investigated. They could have removed evidence against them or placed items to place the blame on others. Then again nothing surprises me on the level of stupidity in the agencies of the Maldives Government.