Firemen try to douse the blaze in the furniture shop. (Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya)

A second-floor shop at The Metropolis, the Hiland Park mall, caught fire on Sunday afternoon, spreading panic among shoppers and cinegoers who had turned up at the third-floor multiplex Fame.

People were quickly evacuated as thick black smoke filled the four-storeyed building.

The fire, which broke out in Estillo Furniture at 12.20pm, was controlled within minutes by four tenders.

The crowd in the adjoining Big Baazar — it shares a wall with The Metropolis — was, however, not evacuated.

“The electrical cable network above the false ceiling of a furniture shop on the second floor had caught fire and there was a lot of smoke,” said Gopal Bhattacharya, the director of fire services.

“Firemen armed with breathing apparatus broke down the false ceiling and extinguished the fire by spraying dry chemical powder.”

The furniture shop suffered minimal damage, said Debangshu Bhattacharya, assistant vice-president of the Hiland Group. “Had the firemen sprayed water, many items in shops in that part of the building would have been damaged.”

The mall authorities and shop-owners, however, indulged in a blame game soon after the blaze was doused.

Bhattacharya said the shop-owners should have switched off power as there were reports of sparks in the cables in the morning. “I have been told that an hour before the fire broke out, there had been sparks in the wires of the furniture shop.”

The Chakgaria Metropolis Mall Traders’ Welfare Association, however, alleged that the management was not maintaining the building properly.

“For the past couple of months, water has been seepage through the third floor. Today, the management had sent an incompetent electrician to our floor to fix a problem. The fire, in fact, broke out 10 minutes after he left,” said Harish Sachdev the assistant secretary of the association. Sachdev’s shop is next to the one that caught fire.