Five little girls are dead following two fires in Durban early on Sunday.
The girls – all aged 6 and younger – had allegedly been left unattended by their parents when their homes went up in flames.
When The Mercury visited the scene of the first blaze in Fannin Road, Wyebank, on Sunday a group of men were standing huddled around a pile of scorched sheets of corrugated iron.
The scent of burning hung in the air and wisps of smoke swirled at their feet.
The men spoke in hushed tones. One was the grandfather of the three who died there – 6-year-old twins Snegugu and Snenhlanhla Mtolo, as well as their 3-year-old sister, Esihle.
“I don’t know what happened,” a distraught Simon Mtolo said.
Just hours before the fire, he was playing with his granddaughters.
“I was here last night, from about 9pm to 10pm. After that I went home. And then around 2.30am someone phoned me and said the place was on fire.”
The children’s mother was not home at the time and Mtolo did not know where she had gone.
A neighbour woke to the sound of the girls’ terrified screams for help.
He tried to rescue them but, Mtolo said, it appeared they had been locked inside.
Mtolo and his family are traumatised.
“This is not right,” he said.
The cause of the fire is not known.
At the scene of the second blaze – in Heysham Place, Westham, Phoenix – a blackened baby bottle stood alongside a stroller at the entrance to a small block of rooms that had gone up in flames.
The heat of the fire could still be felt in the corridors leading to the room where 8-month-old Nikita Lembethe and her 5-year-old sister – Sju – were sleeping at the time.
The room was gutted.
The parents could not be reached in Sunday.
Neighbour Tom Nobert, who lived in another room in the building, said he woke just before 2am to the sound of the fire tearing through the building.
He lived on the ground floor and was able to run outside. But a woman on the second floor had had to jump out of the window and on to a mattress someone had dragged out, he said.
She broke her leg in the jump.
Nobert said they tried to help the children but they could not get into the room they were in.
They had to wait for the firefighters and by the time they arrived, the children were dead.
It is believed they too had been locked in.
Nobert said the girls’ parents were not at home at the time of the fire.
“The youngest couldn’t even sit on her own,” he said.
It is believed the fire started after a burning candle fell over.
KwaZulu-Natal Emergency Medical Services and SAPS Search and Rescue were on the scene on Sunday.
Police spokesperson Captain Nqobile Gwala said inquest dockets were being prepared.