A fire ripped through a shopping mall in eastern Iraq and killed at least 61 people, including children, according to local officials, who blamed the scale of the tragedy on shoddy construction and a lack of preparedness.

Iraq’s interior ministry said the “horrific fire” began on Wednesday night and swept through a recently opened, five-storey shopping centre in the city of Kut. Most of the victims appeared to have suffocated “due to heavy smoke”, the ministry said in a statement, adding that 14 bodies were so badly charred that they had yet to be identified.

The ministry said it had opened an investigation into the fire in Kut, which is southeast of Baghdad.

According to Habib al-Badri, the head of the province’s security committee, an electric malfunction sparked the fire. But he said poor building practices and an unprepared rescue service had worsened the casualty toll.

“There was a lack of emergency exits and emergency ladders and extinguishers. And unfortunately the province was not prepared for such an incident,” he said. “We hope what happened will be a lesson for the future.”

Some political leaders in Iraq moved quickly to cite the fire as another devastating consequence of pervasive corruption in the country. Many regional analysts say that is a legacy of the US occupation of Iraq, when money was widely dispersed for construction projects and contracts with poor oversight. And many Iraqis complain that graft only worsened in the years since.

“This tragedy adds to the tragedies and suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of so many forms of corruption and repeated neglect,” Muqtada al-Sadr, an influential Shia cleric in Iraq, said.

The country’s commission of federal integrity, an independent body that deals with government accountability, highlighted what it said were shortcomings in the initial response to the fire by the ministry’s rescue services, saying in a statement that it would also investigate the blaze.

New York Times News Service