• Cause of fire being ascertained: police chief.
• Fire broke out during Hindu festival preparations.
• Indian PM offers condolences to victims’ families.
  

A firecracker storage facility in southern India caught fire on Tuesday, killing at least eight people, police said, the second such incident in three days.

Nakul Rajendra Deshmukh, police chief in Kerala state’s Thrissur district, told AFP that rescue operations were “over” after the deadly fire, which also left 15 people injured including two in critical condition.

The cause of the fire was being ascertained, he added.

Local media said it broke out during preparations for a Hindu festival.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a social media post that he was “saddened” by the loss of lives and offered his “deepest condolences” to the families of the victims.

On Sunday, 20 people died in a similar blaze at a firecracker factory in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu.

Industrial accidents are common in India, often due to poor adherence to safety regulations and weak enforcement.

Last month, another fire at a fireworks factory in western India killed 17 people.

Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained broadly halted on Tuesday, with only three ships passing the waterway in the past 24 hours, shipping data showed.

A US blockade of Iranian ports has infuriated Tehran, prompting it to maintain its own restrictions on the strait, which had been typically handling roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply.

The Ean Spir products tanker, which had no known flag or known ownership, sailed through Hormuz on Tuesday after previously calling at an Iraqi port, ship tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed.

The Lian Star cargo ship, which had no known flag or known ownership, also sailed through the strait from an Iranian port, the data showed.

Separately, the Meda liquefied petroleum gas tanker, which had called at a United Arab Emirates port in the Gulf and also had no known flag or ownership, crossed the strait on Monday in its second attempt to leave the Gulf after turning back previously, according to satellite analysis from data analytics specialists SynMax.

Those are a fraction of the 140 ships that sailed through daily before the US and Israel’s war on Iran began on February 28.

More than a dozen tankers passed through the strait after Iran briefly declared it open on Friday, before Tehran announced it was closed on Saturday, firing shots at vessels.

“Even vessels that seemingly check the publicly known boxes for successful transit through both blockades can find themselves in danger and unable to pass,” shipbroker BRS said in a note this week.

A ceasefire between the US and Iran appeared in jeopardy on Tuesday with Tehran not committing to join new peace talks and the US military saying it had seized a tanker linked to Iran in international waters.

Seafarers’ lives at risk

Hundreds of ships and 20,000 seafarers remain stuck inside the Gulf unable to sail.

“We cannot put at risk the lives of the seafarers,” Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the UN’s shipping agency, told reporters on the sidelines of Singapore’s maritime week on Tuesday.

“We saw what happened last weekend, that on Friday, when some ships started to sail. Then there was an announcement that the strait was closed, and then some ships were actually targeted. Thankfully, we didn’t have any casualties and there was no damage to the vessels.”

Iran’s army said an Iranian tanker had entered its territorial waters from the Arabian Sea on Monday with help from the Iranian Navy, despite what it described as repeated warnings and threats from the US naval task force.

Shipbroker BRS estimated that 61 non-Iran-related supertankers were trapped inside the Gulf at present, 50 of which were laden with cargoes of up to 2 million barrels each.

“At a time when the world is desperate for crude oil, an additional 2 million barrels slipping out of the Middle East Gulf would be gratefully received,” BRS said.

Nearly 8,000 people died or disappeared on migration routes last year, with sea routes to Europe the deadliest and many victims lost in “invisible shipwrecks”, a UN agency said on Tuesday.

“These figures bear witness to our collective failure to prevent these tragedies,” Maria Moita, who directs the International Organisation for Migration’s humanitarian and response department, told a Geneva press briefing.

Though the 7,904 people dead or missing was down from an all-time high of 9,197 in 2024, the IOM said that was partly due to 1,500 suspected cases that went unverified due to aid cuts.

More than four in every 10 fatalities and disappearances came on sea routes to Europe. Many cases were so-called “invisible shipwrecks” where entire boats are lost at sea and never found, the IOM said in a chilling new report.

The West African route northwards accounted for 1,200 deaths, while Asia reported a record number of fatalities, including hundreds of Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar or misery in crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh.

“Routes are shifting in response to conflict, climate pressures and policy changes, but the risks are still very real,” said IOM Director General Amy Pope in a statement. “Behind these numbers are people taking dangerous journeys and families left waiting for news that may never come.”