Photo: DiplomatTesterMan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Four people were killed and two others were taken to hospital after a fire tore through a shoe factory in outer Delhi’s Mangolpuri Industrial Area on Friday night, police said. The blaze was reported at around 9.30 pm at a unit at B-293/294 in Phase-1 of the industrial area.
Six pulled out unconscious
Police and fire teams reached the factory soon after the alarm was raised and began a rescue operation while firefighters worked to bring the flames under control. The Delhi Fire Service said about 20 water tenders were sent to the spot.
Rescuers found six people lying unconscious inside the building. All of them were rushed to Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Mangolpuri, where doctors declared four of them dead, a senior police officer said. The other two were still being treated late on Friday night. Their condition and the identities of the dead were not immediately made public.
A representative of the CATS ambulance service told reporters at the scene that the service received a call about the fire at 9.50 pm and its crews reached the factory within about five to seven minutes to move the injured to hospital.
Further search and rescue operations are going on. Appropriate legal action is being taken as per the law.
Senior Delhi Police officer
Cause yet to be established
Officials have not yet said what started the fire. Early reports from the scene differed on where in the building it began, with some placing it in the basement and others on an upper floor. Police said the cause of the blaze, and whether the factory had adequate fire safety arrangements, would be looked into. Teams continued searching the premises late into the night in case anyone else was trapped inside.
A recurring risk in Delhi’s industrial pockets
Mangolpuri Industrial Area in outer Delhi houses a large number of small manufacturing units, including footwear, plastic and rubber factories, as well as godowns. Fire officials have previously pointed to chemicals stored in the area’s godowns as an added hazard when blazes break out there.
The area has seen several serious fires before. In 2013, four people died when a shoe factory in Mangolpuri caught fire in the early hours; police said at the time that the unit was being run illegally from a residence. In 2018, a shoe factory blaze in the industrial area took more than nine hours and around 25 fire tenders to put out, though no one was hurt. In June 2025, a rubber factory fire in the same industrial area also drew a large firefighting response.
What happens next
Police have said legal action is under way, and the search of the premises was continuing. Fire officials are expected to examine the building to establish how the blaze started and how quickly it spread, while the probe into the factory’s safety arrangements will decide whether anyone is held responsible. The two injured remain in hospital.
