Bagamoyo infernos: Third time ’unlucky’ for Paradise hotel owner(Uchunguzi unaendelea).
| |
THISDAY REPORTER
Dar es Salaam
INVESTIGATIONS are continuing into the causes of the raging infernos that gutted two popular tourist hotels in Bagamoyo, Coast Region early this week amid rising fears of possible arson involved.
As police and insurance investigators continue their work on the case, THISDAY’s own inquiries have established that this in fact is not the first time that the owner of one of the hotels destroyed has been hit by such a disaster involving one of his various business entities.
It has been verified that Abdullahi Nurguled, the Somali-born owner of Paradise Holiday Resort, was also the proprietor of Guled Hotel in Mogadishu, which similarly burned down some 20 years ago.
He is understood to have then moved to Tanzania a couple of years later, and taken over the once-renowned Morogoro Shoes Company Limited (Moroshoes) as lead investor during its divestiture process from being a formerly state-owned company.
According to available records, the company’s shoe-making plant in Morogoro also burned to the ground in the mid-1990s. This makes the latest incident involving the Paradise Hotel in Bagamoyo third time ’unlucky’ for Nurguled.
However, in a telephone interview with THISDAY yesterday, Nurguled allayed growing suspicions that the Paradise Hotel disaster may have been pre-meditated with the aim of collecting an ample insurance pay-check.
He said it was merely a case of bad luck.
Nurguled declined to speculate too deeply on the causes of the Bagamoyo fire, noting that both his insurers and the police are still investigating the matter.
But on the burning of the Moroshoes plant, he said: ’’I lost everything in Morogoro. The factory was not insured, so I got nothing. I lost at least $1.5m.’’
Regarding the Guled Hotel incident in Mogadishu, he explained that at the time there were riots going on in the troubled Somali capital, and some hooligans took advantage of the situation to vandalize, loot and burn the hotel.
He said he also lost ’everything’ in that disaster. However, he did not touch on the issue of insurance with regard to that incident.
When contacted yesterday for comment on the ongoing police investigation of the fires that gutted both Paradise and Oceanic Bay Resorts in Bagamoyo last Monday, the Director of Criminal Investigations (DCI), Robert Manumba said the aim is to determine whether or not arson was involved.
The two hotels, which stand adjacent to each other along a choice bit of the Indian Ocean coastline in the historically-significant township, were simultaneously burnt to ashes, causing losses estimated to extend to billions of shillings, plus dozens of jobs lost.
According to eyewitness accounts from the scene of the incident, the fire is said to have started in the Paradise Hotel kitchens, spread to the hotel’s thatched roof, and then to the neighbouring Oceanic Bay Hotel, destroying property and vehicles along the way.
No one was injured as all workers and guests at both hotels managed to escape.
According to eyewitness accounts, the inferno was fuelled and spread so quickly because of the palm-thatched roofs over both hotels.
Paradise Hotel officials tentatively estimated the value of the destroyed property to be in the region of $8.6m (approximately 10.8bn/-).
It is understood that the hotel was insured by the Tanzania Investment Bank (TIB).
No comments:
Post a Comment