GERMANY: Nine men were killed yesterday when a flash fire destroyed a shelter for the homeless in Halberstadt, a town 160km (99 miles) west of Berlin.
Fifteen men were still asleep or preparing breakfast in the 24-bed refuge when the fire broke out before dawn. The shelter consisted of 20 portable steel cabins bolted together and placed next to a rail yard in the town.
Some victims were still seated at a table, suggesting they were overcome by fumes. Six survivors ran to safety and five were taken to hospital with injuries, but none was in a critical condition.
Police said they did not yet know the cause of the blaze, but they had not found any evidence of an arson attack.
The fire began within the refuge. Fire crews said it was quickly put out, but they arrived too late to save the nine victims.
Saxony-Anhalt state interior minister Klaus Jeziorsky said it would take time to establish what had happened.
The fire was the worst in a German homeless shelter since a 1995 blaze killed nine people at a refuge in the town of Detmold.
Shock was felt throughout Halberstadt, a quiet town with a population of 40,000. Fire brigade commander Harald Boeer said that the charred bodies were the most ghastly sight of his 33 years of firefighting.
Michael Haase, a municipal official who oversaw the refuge, said: "It has been there since 1996. We never had any problems with it and it has always been clean."
A lobby group for the homeless in Germany, Wohnungslosenhilfe, claimed that the fire highlighted the shabby state of many of the country's refuges.
Werena Rosenke said she did not know what the Halberstadt site had been like, but municipal shelters were often overcrowded.
She said many such refuges lacked kitchens, which encouraged residents to use gas-powered camping cookers. Fires were also common because homeless people could be careless with cigarettes and matches.
Another national group for the homeless said that 345,000 people in Germany, which has a population of 80 million, currently sleep rough or have no homes.