Firefighters and police broke open at least 10 doors bolted from inside at Rituraj Hotel on Wednesday morning and found people hiding in washrooms or lying on beds. All of them were dead by then.

Some of them would have thought they were away from the blaze and safe, and some tried to slink to the farthest corner of their rooms to protect themselves, firefighters familiar with such scenes said.

The blaze did not kill them; the smoke did.

Veteran firefighters who saw the victims, without any burns but dead, said the sight revived memories of the 2011 fire at AMRI hospital in Dhakuria where the smoke had claimed 93 lives.

The police said of the 13 who died inside the hotel, two were found dead near the terrace, one on the staircase between the first and the second floors, while the remaining 10 were all locked up inside their rooms. The 14th victim was a staff member who panicked and jumped off a cornice on the hotel’s third floor.

“When our team entered the building, there was complete darkness. The torch on our helmets was the only source of light with which we could make our way through the thick black smoke,” said a rescue team member.

A disaster management group (DMG) team took the stairs from the ground floor and started the search operation.

The seat of fire appeared to be on the first floor, where the flames were still leaping up when the first rescue team reached.

As the team progressed to the second floor, they found a man lying on the staircase on the landing between the first and the second floors.

“By the time we reached the second floor, there was complete silence. We searched one room after another. Most of the rooms were either open or empty,” said a member of the rescue team.

Of the 40 rooms that the hotel has, at least 10 were bolted from inside.

One of the rooms had three bodies — two of them children.

One had a man hiding in the washroom holding onto all his luggage. A woman was found on the bed in one of the rooms, sources said.

“The way people had locked themselves into their rooms or were ready to leave with their luggage, suggested they were trying and hoping to protect themselves from the fire. But they could not stop the smoke,” said a senior official of the fire department.

All the bodies found inside the hotel were covered in soot.

The fire department official said the blaze had started on the first floor and leapt up towards the fourth and fifth floors.

“It was a surprise that there were no burn marks on the middle floors. The flames were spotted only on the first floor and then directly on the fourth and fifth floors. Forensic tests will reveal the actual reason,” said the official.

Two of the three persons whose bodies were not found in the rooms had died because of “thermal burns”, the preliminary post-mortem report has shown, the police said.

One of the those who died from thermal burns was Kamal Nawalgaria. The identity of the other victim was yet to be established.

Thermal burns mean they died because of the heat from the flames.