Fuego en Buenos Aires en una disco mata a 169

A blaze in a Buenos Aires nightclub packed with young people celebrating the New Year holidays killed at least 169 and injured 375, city officials said on Friday. The blaze is thought to have been caused by a flare being fired into the club?s ceiling, sending burning debris onto the crowd and triggering a stampede.

?The fire spread in a minute and we were a mountain of people trying to escape,? said survivor Ariel Monges, 25, who lost a friend and a cousin in the fire and was searching for another friend at the Rivadavia Hospital.

The flares are sold on streets all over Latin America for the New Year holiday festivities.

Local media reported that as many as 3,000 to 4,000 people may have been inside the Republica Cromagnon club in the gritty, run-down neighborhood of Once listening to a band when the fire broke out an hour before midnight on Thursday.

Children as young as 10 were among the victims in what was being described as one of Argentina?s worst disasters, according to people helping in the rescue effort.

?The city does not remember such a grave situation,? city health secretary Alfredo Stern said.

Witnesses told Reuters reporters on the scene that a flare was shot into the club?s ceiling, which was covered with foam.

Pieces of the burning ceiling fell, triggering a stampede and many people collapsed from smoke inhalation.

?There are versions that flares caused the fire, but I cannot confirm this until we have more information from the fire department,? Mayor Anibal Ibarra told TN television.

It was not immediately clear if fire exits and doors were unblocked.

Police said the fire was extinguished quickly, but rescue workers spent a few hours removing people on stretchers from inside the club.

Television showed pictures of the bodies lying on the sidewalks outside the club.

Parents first rushed to the scene desperate to find their sons and daughters amid the chaos, but then flocked to the 14 hospitals where the dead and injured were taken.

At a makeshift morgue in a garage beside the club, witnesses said 30 bodies were lined up and family members were allowed to pass to identify them.

?There was a girl who must have been around 10 years old,? said Fernando Justiniano, a former fireman who helped in the rescue. ?She was asphyxiated poor thing, and she was burned.?

The blaze was the worst in the Americas since a supermarket fire in neighboring Paraguay last August killed nearly 400 people. The owners are accused of closing the doors after the fire broke out to stop looting.

Many other fires have occurred in Latin America in recent years because of fireworks, sold on most every street corner around the holidays.

Exactly three years ago, more than 300 people were killed when a fire roared through a crowded shopping area in the Peruvian capital Lima.

The blaze started with an explosion at a shop selling fireworks for New Year parties.

Thursday night?s Buenos Aires club fire recalled a similar blaze in the United States in February 2003 when a pyrotechnics display at the start of a heavy metal concert ignited sound-proofing material at a club in Rhode Island, killing 100 people and injuring nearly 200.