13 children killed in Qatari shopping centre fire The blaze left "19 dead, including 13 children, among them seven girls and six boys, in addition to four female teachers," the interior ministry said on its Twitter page, citing the country's health minister. The fire started at a nursery, state minister for the interior Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Thani said, adding that firefighters had to break through the roof to get to trapped children after a staircase to the first-floor nursery collapsed. It was not immediately clear what caused the blaze in the shopping mall, and the interior ministry said an investigation was under way. "There don't seem to have been any fire alarms or sprinklers at the mall," a relative of a two-year-old child who died in the fire told the Reuters news agency. Many expatriates live in Qatar, a gas and oil-rich Gulf Arab state due to host the football World Cup in 2022, with one of the highest standards of living in the world. The Villagio Mall, which opened in 2006, is an Italianate-themed shopping complex with a hotel, theme park and canal plied by gondolas.