A Deadly Fire today killed at least 240 people and so many others injured in a nightclub caused by a pyrotechnics show in the southern Brazilian city of Santa Maria, a police official has said.
"There were about 245 dead" Major Cleberson Bastianello, a military police commander in the southern Brazilian city of Santa Maria, told local news media on Sunday.
Bodies were still being removed from the Kiss nightclub, according to Major Gerson da Rosa Ferreira, who was leading rescue efforts at the scene for the military police.
Ferreira said the victims died of asphyxiation or from being trampled, and there were as many as 500 people inside the club when the fire broke out, most of which were teenagers and people in their 20s, The Nightclub is very close to a college campus.
People were trying to scramble their way out of the building but it was so difficult for them to exit out of the Nightclub.
'Tragedy for all of us'
This Tragedy Made 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.
"It is a tragedy for all of us. I am not going to continue in the meeting [in Chile] for very clear reasons,'' she said.
Santa Maria is near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay, some 300km west of the state capital of Porto Alegre.
Luiza Sousa, a civil police official in Santa Maria, told Reuters news agency the blaze started when a member of the band or its production team ignited a flare, which then set fire to the ceiling. The fire spread "in seconds," Sousa said.
Rio Grande do Sul state's health secretary, Ciro Simoni, said respirators from all over the state were being sent to the scene of the Fire Outbreak.
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