Hundreds evacuated from Suria KLCC mall after fire breaks out at emergency stairway

Hundreds of shoppers were evacuated from Malaysia’s upscale Suria KLCC shopping mall on Sept 29 after the fire alarm rang at about 8.10pm, according to social media posts.

In a series of posts, X user @ryanwen_hui wrote that there appeared to be a fire in the foodcourt of the mall, which is connected to the iconic Petronas Twin Towers.

“The motorcycle parking area 1 was full of smoke. Everyone is being evacuated from KLCC now, parking and entering the mall has been blocked and closed,” he wrote, adding that there were at least three fire engines at the scene. 

In a statement, the Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department said it arrived at the scene at 8.12pm.

“The responding team saw thick smoke on the third floor and searched for the source.

“The cause was found inside an emergency stairway, where boxes were burning inside a trash container,” a spokesperson said.

The fire was extinguished at 8.45pm. No one was hurt.

At least five users on Xiaohongshu also uploaded posts about the incident.

One of them said he was asked to evacuate while in the midst of an omakase dinner.

Another user Shawn, 24, told The Straits Times that he was serving customers at a telco shop in the mall when the fire alarm went off.

At first, he thought it was a fire drill. No one was leaving the mall until security personnel started directing the crowd to evacuate about 10 minutes later.

“Everyone was moving rather slowly,” said Shawn, who gave only his first name.

Facebook user Cojack Hong Ying Koh said the evacuation was the most “inefficient” one he had experienced.

He said he was told multiple times by security guards at Kinokuniya bookstore to ignore the alarm when it first went off.

But he eventually made his way to the ground floor after other security guards told him to evacuate.

In several social media posts, hundreds of evacuated mallgoers were seen standing outside the mall, with some documenting the chaos with their phones.

In a statement on Facebook at about 11.10pm, Suria KLCC said the fire alarm was triggered in the mall’s back-of-house area due to the presence of smoke.

“The smoke was primarily contained within the stairwell, but as a precaution, management initiated an evacuation to ensure the safety of all visitors and tenants,” it said.

The mall was deemed safe for customers to re-enter at around 9.35pm and has since resumed normal operations, it added.

A fire had previously broken out at Suria KLCC on May 1, but was swiftly contained. There were no injuries reported.

That fire reportedly started in the sauna of a fitness centre, which was closed for at least four days after the incident.