’All my children died...I could do nothing’: Grieving mother recalls tragic night in Fujairah

Her voice is still raspy due to smoke inhalation during the fire that claimed the lives of all her seven children in her home in Rul Dadna district of Fujairah.

Her throat and lungs still ache from the cough but Salima Al Suraidi cares not for such small matters.

Her searing emotional pain and grief at her monumental loss is all she can experience at the moment as she recalls the terrible morning of January 22 when she woke up to the sight of thick, impenetrable smoke shrouding the room her children were sleeping in.

  I felt myself losing control. I had pain in my chest because of the smoke. My brother rushed to my house ... He tried to save my children, but they had already died of suffocation.”

 - Salima Al Suraidi | Mother of the children 

Speaking to us in her first interview after that terrible day, she is agonised by the fact that she could not to save her children.

“All my children died and I could not do anything for them,” said the distraught mother.

Each day, she said, is a struggle to get through as memories of her children flood her mind. Her husband died of cancer four years ago, leaving her alone to raise their seven children.

Twins Sara and Sumaiya were suffering from flu that night.

On the night of January 21, she had asked her children to go to bed at 10pm as usual, as they had to get up early the next morning for school. Her sons slept in a room adjacent to her bedroom.

“But they begged me to stay back [in their room] and spend some more time with them. We stayed up chatting and enjoying our time as they regaled me with tales of what they would do when they grew up,” said Salima.

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