Left alone in his apartment, 4-year-old Rashed lit a tissue box, not knowing what he was doing. A fire erupted and the boy didn’t know what to do. Frightened Rashed tossed the flaming tissue box into a nearby cabinet.
As the fire spread out of the cabinet and to nearby objects, the boy got scared and hid under his bed. “We found him after an hour. It was a heartbreaking sight.
We couldn’t distinguish the boy from the charred remains of the furniture,” Ali Aldagher, a firefighter with Kuwait Fire Force (KFF) said, recalling an incident that occurred in Jaber Al-Ali in 2017 that turned out to be an eye-opener for many and served as a stark reminder for the local parent community. “If asked whether I sympathized with Rashed’s parents, I would say no, because it was their responsibility. They failed in their responsibility,” Aldagher told Kuwait Times.
As he emphasized the responsibility of the parents, he said there was neither a smoke detector nor a fire extinguisher in their apartment. “They didn’t teach their kid what to do in case of an emergency,” he said. Rashed’s shocking death and the bloodcurdling incident prompted him to come up with “Junior Firefighter”, a book that teaches children what to do in case of an emergency and explains survival skills.
Around 70,000 copies both Arabic and English were printed and were given away to school children and their parents. The book was sponsored by EQUATE Petrochemical company, he said. During the COVID-1.
