The death of five young people – at least four of them minors – in a fire has stunned the small town of Manlleu, in northeastern Spain.
The blaze started in a storage room at the top of a five-storey building on Monday night. Firefighters arrived on the scene soon after residents raised the alert when smoke was detected in the stairwell.
They extinguished the fire within half an hour and one of the youngsters was brought outside unconscious, but emergency personnel were unable to revive him. The other four remained trapped inside.
The youngest victim was aged 14, two were 15, and the others were 16 and either 17 or 18, according to information provided by their friends to the media.
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Five other people were hurt although none of them seriously.
Most of the building’s residents were evacuated to a nearby civic centre and were allowed to return to their flats after the authorities confirmed that no structural damage had been caused. Three families spent the night in a hotel.
Relatives of the victims received psychological support nearby.
The cause of the fire is still not known, or why the youngsters were unable to escape the blaze. According to media reports the police, who inspected the building throughout Tuesday morning, believe that the youths might have died after inhaling fumes from a mattress or clothes that were set alight.
Young people regularly used the storage room as a meeting place, residents said.
“It was black smoke like I’d never seen before in my life,” one of the residents of the building, a 33-year-old named as Mohamed, told El País newspaper. He thought the smoke was coming from a kitchen, until he saw that the police had arrived.
“I went up to the fourth floor,” he said. “We got a lot of people out, women who were alone with children.”
Video released of Catalan police inside the building showed the storage area. It had several unlit rooms separated by walls of breeze blocks. The room where the fire started had the charred remains of pieces of wood and other waste at one end.
Manlleu is about 60km north of Barcelona and has a population of approximately 20,000. The area where the fire happened has a large immigrant community, with many residents of Moroccan origin.
One of the boys who died was named by local media as Mohamed Murchid.
“He liked to play with his PlayStation,” his mother, Naima Bouzikou, told La Vanguardia newspaper. “He used to meet with his friends in the area.”
The mayor of Manlleu, Arnau Rovira, said “there are no words to describe so much pain” and declared three days of mourning in the town.
