‘Black smoke was pouring from the tower – everything was chaos’published at 06:35 British Summer Time
This post contains distressing details.
Image source, Getty ImagesAt 08:30 BST, on 14 June 2017, Karim Mussilhy woke up to get ready for work. Stepping out of the shower, he heard a scream.
His wife ran into the bathroom and showed him an image on her phone of the Grenfell Tower on fire.
Karim had grown up on the same estate. His family still lived at the foot of the tower and his uncle, Hesham Rahman, had a flat on the twenty-third floor of the building – the top of the tower.
“One of the first things I did was call uncle Hesham,” he recalls on the BBC’s Grenfell: Building a Disaster podcast. His phone kept ringing, but there was no answer.
Karim raced in his car to Grenfell. When he arrived, he saw firefighters in tears. “I still didn’t understand the severity of the situation”.
Then he looked up.
Quote MessageI was just blown away. I could still see flames coming out of the window at the top – thick, black smoke just pouring out of it. And the smell was just like this thick, plastic-y, toxic smell. Everything was chaos.”
Karim previously told the inquiry he felt abandoned in the days following the fire, and had no help to find out what happened to his uncle.
Hesham’s death was officially confirmed two months later.
Read More: Grenfell Tower report live updates: Final report of inquiry to be published
