A fire broke out at a nightclub in the southeastern Spanish city of Murcia early on Sunday morning, killing at least 13 people and injuring four others, authorities said.
The fire started around 6 a.m. local time (4 a.m. GMT) at the Teatre nightclub, also known as Fonda Milagros, which was hosting a birthday party, according to local media reports.
Firefighters arrived at the scene and managed to extinguish the blaze by 8 a.m., but faced difficulties in accessing the building due to the risk of collapse and the presence of smoke, Murcia’s mayor José Ballesta said.
The mayor said that there were still bodies to be pulled out from the rubble and that he could not rule out the possibility of finding more victims
The injured were two women aged 22 and 25 and two men aged 41 and 45, who were all taken to the hospital due to smoke inhalation, the Murcia emergency services website said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation by forensic and judicial police experts, the national police service said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expressed his solidarity with the victims and relatives of the tragedy and thanked the emergency services for their work.
The city’s town hall declared three days of mourning and set up a reception base for the relatives of victims, where a team of psychologists will provide assistance.
This is one of the deadliest nightclub fires in Spain’s history. In 1990, 43 people died in a fire at a nightclub in Zaragoza, and in 2017, 40 people were injured when a floor collapsed at a nightclub in Tenerife.
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