Tribute to brothers killed in Thornton Lodge house fire

May 8 2009 by Joanne Douglas, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A RELATIVE of two boys killed in a fire described them as beautiful, happy boys.

Nasreen Akhtar lives next door to the boy’s mother, Nazia Akhtar, in Thornton Lodge.

She saw the moment Nazia fought to rescue them from the blaze.

Junaid, two, and Sohail, four, both died after the blaze at their home on Rashcliffe Hill Road early on Wednesday afternoon.

Nazia’s two other sons were at school at the time of the tragedy.

Nasreen, 35, said they were a close family who had been completely devastated by the tragedy.

“Nazia is such a great mother,’’ she said. “Her boys are so beautiful and brilliant to be around.

“They were gorgeous kids and very happy and playful too – they’d always be playing with my kids.

“It’s such a loss for us all. We can’t really understand it at the moment.”

Nasreen had just returned from a driving lesson when she saw Nazia, who is eight-months pregnant, in the garden of her home trying to reach her sons.

She added: “I saw her in the garden screaming. She just wanted to get her boys.

“She told me her children were upstairs in the back bedroom and we saw that one of the builders who was working down the road was trying to get to them at the back window.

“I think she did everything she could.

“We thought they would be OK when they were taken to hospital, but after five minutes they died.

“Nazia is in shock. We all are trying to understand why it happened.

“She is pregnant, but they checked her and she is OK.”

Nazia was downstairs with a friend at the time of the fire while her sons were both upstairs.

She was alerted when builders noticed smoke coming from the window.

Karl Deacon, one of the builders who tried to rescue the youngsters, told of his trauma at not being able to save them.

“We did our best, we just hoped that there was just enough time to save even one of them but obviously – tragically – we could only do what we could do.

“We used a ladder to get in through a window.

“We could see about a foot into the bedroom and we could see the cot and everything on fire.

“We got the door open to the bedroom and we came into it with the fire extinguisher, but the kids had stopped crying by then.