12 • The Sunday Times Magazine
he five-year-old girl loved her home in the
sky. From their bunk beds on the 20th floor,
she and her sister Malak, eight, would watch
the fireworks spark magically over London.
Malak slept on the top bunk but sometimes
the two sisters swapped or curled up
together. Soon their baby sister would also
be able to cuddle up with them, but Leena,
just six months old, was still too little.
Malak would dress up as Merida, the
Highland warrior princess from the film
Brave. The five-year-old girl liked the Hulk,
and together they would fight evil. Each
night their blue school uniforms lay ready,
meticulously folded. Everything had a place
and a label. Their mother, Farah, a nursery
nurse born and raised in London, was like
that. Near a brimming bookshelf, the clock
that taught the time ticked away.
In a few hours it would all be gone. Mum,
and then waited for her husband Omar’s
shift delivering takeaways to end at
midnight. Next door to flat 175, Jessica
Urbano Ramirez, with her infectious giggle
and corkscrew curls, was planning a
sleepover with friends for her 13th birthday.
One floor up, Medhi El-Wahabi, 8, was
sleeping while his sister, Nur Huda, 15,
revised for her GCSEs. She loved football
and wanted to be a PE teacher. They grew
up racing round the 21st-floor landing with
their cousins Sara, 8, and Zak Chebiouni, 16,
who lived on the ninth floor.
Zak and Yasin, Nur Huda’s big brother,
had gone to the mosque to say the prayer
that would close their Ramadan fast, then
had milkshakes at Tinseltown, a local
American diner. “Everyone loved Yas,”
Zak says. Yasin, 20, had grown from a
toddler who threw cereal from the 21st-
floor window into an entrepreneurial
accountancy student.
Just as Yasin arrived home, a Hotpoint
fridge-freezer was smouldering in flat 16 on
the fourth floor. It triggered a smoke alarm,
which woke the sleeping tenant, an Uber
driver. At 12.54am he made the first 999
call, woke all his immediate neighbours
and fled barefoot. Firefighters reached the
tower within four minutes, but at 1.09am
— before they had entered the burning
kitchen — flames broke out and started
climbing up the east façade. There were no
sprinklers in the tower.
The cladding became the “principal
reason” why fire spread rapidly, the
inquiry found. Made of aluminium
composite material (ACM) by the US
metals giant Arconic, the cladding was a
sandwich of 3mm-thick highly flammable
polyethylene plastic between two
0.5mm-thick aluminium sheets. The plastic
melts and drips at 130C; at 377C it ignites.
This started new fires lower down the
tower, and so the flames spread up, downDad, Malak and Leena. The five-year-old girl
would lose them all in the Grenfell fire. Of
the Belkadi family she alone would survive.
“Her whole world just changed,” says her
aunt, Samira Hamdan, speaking for the first
time on the eve of the five-year anniversary
of the tragedy this Tuesday. The story of
the Belkadi family, residents of flat 175 in
Grenfell Tower, has never been told. Samira
has agreed to tell it if we do not identify her
surviving niece. Her family never wanted
her to become the face of the fire, the girl
who lived. They wanted her to be “just
another child in the playground”.
Eighteen children died in the disaster
— a quarter of the children who lived in the
tower. In total 72 people were killed. After
almost 400 days of testimony and more
than 300,000 documents disclosed to the
public inquiry into the fire, we can now
reconstruct not just what happened that
fateful night but, crucially, why.
The story explains why 640,000 people,
many of them children, are still living in
flats that can burn at any moment, and why
up to 4.2 million residents of blocks taller
than 11m — 8 per cent of people in England
— have been caught in the fallout.
Government failures, corporate wrongdoing
and regulatory incompetence created one
of the biggest scandals of our time.
Today 94 per cent of the dangerous
flats are still not fixed. Between them, the
manufacturers who made misleading
statements about the panels that fuelled the
fire have made £6.5 billion in profit since
the disaster without paying a penny either
to compensate the families who suffered or
to strip their products from blocks all over
Britain. Housebuilders remain locked in
battles with the housing secretary, Michael
Gove, flat owners and insurance companies.
The tower remains shrouded in plastic.
Samira’s surviving niece is now ten years
old and, five years on, she still mourns the
people she loved most. No one has been
charged with a crime.12.54AM: THE FIRST 999 CALL
At first the Belkadi family were pleased
with local authority plans to wrap their 1974
concrete tower block in silvery cladding.
It would be warmer inside and smarten
things up, they thought.
They did not know that Arconic, Celotex
and Kingspan, the companies whose panels
covered Grenfell Tower (and thousands of
other flats), had practised “frauds ... on the
market”, according to lawyers for Grenfell
families. Nor did they know that the
government had failed to tighten rules
— despite many warnings. The £8.6 million
refurbishment of the 24-storey tower, using
materials that were known to be highly
flammable, was finished in 2016.
Barely a year later, on a warm but ordinary
Tuesday, darkness fell. That evening Leena
played peekaboo with her jiddi (grandfather)
while Farah, 31, took the girls to taekwondo