According to emergency services, four minors died in a fire in a building in Vigo, a city in northwestern Spain, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, a tragedy that caused an uproar in the country.
“Four people lost their lives, all minors,” while the injured were evacuated to several local hospitals, emergency services in Galicia, the region where Vigo is located, said on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
These services, contacted by AFP, then stated that the victims, whose identities were “confirmed by the police”, were “between 9 and 14 years old”.
Nine injured people were treated in hospitals, three of whom were in “serious condition,” it said. Of these three seriously injured people, one is a minor.
However, according to emergency services, the causes of this fire are “unknown”.
Middle of the night
This fire broke out shortly before 4 a.m. (2 a.m. GMT) on the ground floor of a building in the As Travesas district of this coastal town in Galicia.
According to the local press, the fire department managed to extinguish the flames three hours later. A firefighter was poisoned after inhaling smoke while on duty.
Local media photos show shocked residents early this morning near the building, whose ground floor was ravaged by flames that also reached certain windows on the upper floors.
A team of psychologists specializing in emergencies was also dispatched to the scene of the accident to help the victims’ relatives, the emergency services said.
The president of the Galicia region, Alfonso Rueda, said in a message on
This fire occurred just as the country was hit by another particularly devastating fire on October 1st, in which 13 people died early that morning in a nightclub in the city of Murcia (southeast).
This news particularly shocked the country as the flame-damaged nightclub had been under an official closure order since last year, but this was not implemented.