Fires break out at Melbourne’s Park Hotel detention centre housing refugees and asylum seekers

Fires break out at Melbourne’s Park Hotel detention centre that houses refugees and asylum seekers

• Two fires started inside a Melbourne Hotel used to asylum seeker detainees
• Thirty firefighters attended the Carlton Hotel on Swanston Street on Thursday
• It is understood the detainees were moved to a safe place but not let outside

Two fires have started on separate levels of a Melbourne hotel housing detained refugees and asylum seekers, who remain inside the building.

Fire Rescue Victoria said there were fires on the third and fourth levels of the Park Hotel on Swanston Street on Thursday afternoon, believed to have started around 1.3pm.

One of the fires is understood to have started in a bedroom and it is unknown how either blaze started, an FRV spokesman said.

Asylum seeker and refugee men have been kept in the hotel, some for nearly two years. It is also understood there was a recent Covid-19 outbreak among the detainees.

Eye witnesses on the scene did not report any of the men living in the hotel had been evacuated.

A man claiming to be a detainee in the building took to social media to complain the group was being kept inside the smoke-filled building.

‘Some people can’t breathe and they holding us in the first floor of the hotel where we got no access to the fresh air,’ Mehdi Alli tweeted.

‘Everything is so chaotic and I can’t breathe at the moment.’

A refugee advocate, Amin Afravi, tweeted a video of what he said was a detainee ‘handcuffed, moved in building’.

No injuries have yet been reported from the incidents.

The fires were brought under control shortly after 3pm and 30 firefighters were on the scene working to remove smoke from the building.

Originally published at https://topmostpopular.com on December 23, 2021.