Eleven children and four adults have died in a fire in Honduras. The victims were hunting rabbits in a burning sugarcane field when they were trapped by the blaze.
The fire started when workers set the fire to 40 acres of the Choluteca sugar company in Santa Cruz, 100 miles south of the capital, Tegucigalpa, Security Ministry spokesman Leonel Sauceda said.
The children, who ranged in ages from 5 to 17, and a few adults were in a nearby field, waiting to catch the rabbits as they escaped the fire. But the blaze spread out of control and trapped them, Sauceda said.
"The wind spread the fire rapidly," he said.
Firefighter Mario Velasquez said the sudden change confused the children, who began stripping off their clothes as they mistakenly ran toward the fire rather than away from it.
The 11 children died immediately, while the four adults died at the hospital, Sauceda said.
Police maintained for hours that there were 13 victims and all were children, but later gave an updated death toll that also reflected that some of the dead were adults.
The lone survivor, an 18-year-old, remained hospitalized with severe burns late Tuesday night.
Workers did not know the children were nearby until they heard their screams and family members ran to rescue them, Sauceda said.
Relatives of the victims sobbed as the charred bodies were laid out on a concrete floor Tuesday, then lowered under white sheets into coffins. Most of the 500 residents of Santa Cruz, a poor town on the border with Nicaragua, work as laborers in the sugar industry.
AP