A fire swept through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early on Sunday, killing at least 245 people and leaving at least 200 injured, police and firefighters said.
Police Major Cleberson Braida told local news media that the 245 bodies were brought for identification to a gymnasium in the city of Santa Maria.
That toll apparently would make it the deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.
The cause of the fire is not yet known, officials said. Officials earlier put the death toll at 180.
Civil Police and regional government spokesman Marcelo Arigoni told Radio Gaucha earlier that the total number of victims is still unclear and there may be hundreds injured,
The newspaper Diario de Santa Maria reported that the fire started at around 2 a.m. at the Kiss nightclub in the city at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.
Rodrigo Moura, whom the paper identified as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and partygoers were pushing and shoving to escape.
The fire led President Dilma Roussef to cancel a series of meetings she had scheduled at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Chile’s capital of Santiago, and was headed to Santa Maria, according to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry.
Santa Maria is a university city with a population of around a quarter of a million.
A welding accident reportedly set off a December 25, 2000, fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.
At least 194 people died at an overcrowded working-class nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004.
A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, broke out on December 5, 2009, when an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches, killing 152
A nightclub fire in the U.S. state of Rhode Island in 2003 killed 100 people.
Published - January 27, 2013 05:35 pm IST
