Fire destroys Belize City building
The Belize National Basketball Team was burning up the competition this weekend at City Centre… and later in the broadcast James Adderley will have all the delightful details… but in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while most Belize City residents slumbered peacefully, content with their team’s opening victory, another building was burning, not figuratively but literally. An alert citizen, caught it on home video.
The fire, which started shortly after three Saturday morning,
took only twenty minutes to destroy the thirty year old, two storey wooden building, at the corner of Magazine and Cemetery Road.
Henry Baizar, Fire Chief
“When the guys arrived there, the entire building was in flames, both top and bottom floors. We arrived there with two vehicles and about five fire fighters and one of the vehicles was positioned on Cemetery Road. The other one went to the canal to get water and send back water to the scene of the fire. They contained the fire to the one building and tried not to allow it to get out of hand and to spread onto the other buildings across the street. We had to throw water onto the other buildings in order for it not to go up in flames likewise.”
According to fire chief, Henry Baizar immediately upon investigating the inferno, they realized this was not your ordinary run of the mill house fire.
Henry Baizar
“From neighbors who saw the fire at its early stages, they say that the fire started on the verandah of the building upstairs. No one lived in the building upstairs, cause the owner is in the States. We’ve checked all the electrical wiring and everything and what not and we cannot come up with an electrical fire. So the fire must have been started by someone who started it. As yet we do not know.”
Jacqueline Woods
“Robbery is one motive authorities believe the fire was deliberately set. According to sources two men threw something on the upstairs verandah that started the fire.”
The fire, says Baizar was to get the attention of thirty-four year old Xin Ru Xu, the Chinese businessman who lived downstairs.
Henry Baizar
“They lost everything because the occupants of the building downstairs, who is a Chinese businessman who run a grocery store, lives there with his wife and two children. He was awaken by neighbors beating on his door, saying that there was a fire upstairs. When he came out and saw the fire, he did not have a second chance to run back to take out anything so he virtually lost everything.”
While the Chinese family was unable to save any of their household items or thirty thousand dollars worth of groceries, they did try to save three thousand dollars worth of jewelry and one thousand dollars in Chinese and Canadian currency. But according to police as the businessman made it through the back door, four Creole men were waiting for him with open arms. They snatched the valuable purse and ran off. It is not known if the house was insured as the owner of the building, one Fred Gill lives in the United States.
Gill’s nephew, Cecil Gill, was detained by police but released, pending further investigation. Gill sometimes sleeps upstairs on the veranda but says he was not there on the night of the fire.
