Justice for Grenfell: the fight is only just beginning

Seven years after the fire which resulted in the avoidable deaths of 72 residents, Zoë Beaty speaks to the grieving relatives who feel their voices are still not being heard

- Zoë Beaty

On Tuesday, Damel Carayol took a long-awaited trip. Seven years after the Grenfell fire killed 72 and irrevocably changed the lives of hundreds more, and five years after the first inquiry report was delivered, Carayol picked up his copy of the final findings.

“I went with my niece,” he says. “She took out one of the volumes and the page immediately fell on the names of our two relatives. And this report is more than 1,000 pages long. But there they were: Mary Mendy, Khadija Saye. I said to her, they are around us. They’re helping to guide us through. Because they want justice as well.”

Carayol’s cousin, Khadija, 24, a talented artist who had been selected to exhibit her work at the Venice Biennale, and her Gambian mother Mary, were trapped on the 20th floor of the tower when the fire began just before 1 am on 14 June 2017. At 1.49 am, a terrified Khadija posted online asking friends and family to “pray for me and my mum”. They had tried to escape, but the smoke was “too strong”.

The report, published yesterday, is a landmark moment in the fight for justice for Khadija, Mary and the other 70 victims of the fire, who all have equally harrowing stories. One floor below, Marjorie and Ernie Vital, mother and son, were found fused as they clung to each other while flames engulfed them; four-year-old Fethia, known as “Fou-Fou”, lived in flat 203 and died alongside her mother and sister. Berkti, 29, and her son Biruk Haftom, 12, were found dead higher up in the building, after climbing up the tower to seek refuge. Berkti was 10 weeks pregnant at the time.