UP TO 150 people were feared dead after fire raged through a fashionable Manila disco crowded with young revellers celebrating the end of the Philippine academic year, rescuers said last night.
Manila radio reports said many were trampled to death in a stampede for the narrow exit when the blaze broke out at the Ozone disco shortly after midnight (4 p.m. Irish time) in the Philippine capital's Quezon City district.
They quoted witnesses as saying they heard people banging and screaming for help from inside the nightspot at the height of the inferno.
"Those dead were trapped inside," the Quezon City mayor, Mr Mel Mathay, told reporters, adding an exact death toll was not immediately available. Firemen were still searching the debris.
"It's difficult to say how many dead because bodies are piled up," said the Quezon City police chief, Mr Hercules Cataluna.
Witnesses said the club was crowded with as many as 300 people, many of them young students marking the end of their academic year.
Entrance fees at the Ozone, whose clientele was mainly upper middle class, were half priced on Monday nights, local radio said.
Official records show that the fire is the worst in post second World War Philippine history.
The previous highest fire death toll was in November 1977, when a fire in the Hotel Filipinas left 47 people dead.