As many as 43 workers were killed and dozens injured in a building fire in an area heavily populated with foreign workers in Kuwait, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.

Forty-three people were injured, the health ministry said, after the blaze broke out in a residential building south of Kuwait City at dawn.

"Unfortunately, we received a report of a fire at... exactly 6:00 am (0300 GMT) in the Mangaf area," Major General Eid Al-Owaihan, director of the interior ministry's General Department of Criminal Evidence, said during a visit to the site.

"As for the deaths in the building behind me, the number has exceeded 35 so far."

Forensic teams have identified three of the bodies, Owaihan added.

According to a source in the General Fire Department, the victims suffocated from rising smoke after the fire broke out on the ground floor.

The building's owner has been detained in an investigation into potential negligence, the Interior Minister Sheikh Fahd Al-Yousef said as he too visited the scene.