Barcelona fire kills four, including two children
BARCELONA: A fire ripped through an abandoned bank occupied
by squatters in central Barcelona on Tuesday (Nov 30), killing four people,
including a baby and a three-year-old boy, Spanish firefighters said.
"While we were battling the fire, we found four people. Emergency services tried to revive them, but unfortunately they failed, they could not do anything to save them," the head of the firefighting operation, Angel Lopez, told reporters.
A neighbour who lives in a flat above the bank said people
trapped on the premises had been screaming, pleading for help after the blaze
broke out.
"It is a huge shame because there were two small
children that we saw around here," Miquel Guimera told reporters at the
scene.
"There was a lot of smoke ... the squatters were
screaming, asking for help, because you can see that they were locked up. It was
quite traumatic."
People had lived in the abandoned office for two to three
years, he said.
Lopez said it was not clear how the four dead people were
related but Barcelona-based daily newspaper La Vanguardia said they were all
members of the same family. The father was from Pakistan and the mother from
Romania, the paper said.
'THE HORROR'
"There are no words to describe the horror of four
people dying, among them two very young children, it is something that never
should happen. It is horrible news," Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, a former
anti-evictions activist, told reporters.
Those in the buiding lived "in absolutely precarious
conditions", she added.
Four other people were rescued after seeking refuge on the patio and taken to hospital with smoke inhalation, but their lives were not in danger, firefighters said.
Firefighters rushed to the scene at around 6am after being
warned that a blaze had broken out in the building, Lopez said.
The building located in a middle-class neighbourhood was
cordoned off and surrounded by emergency vehicles. The name of the bank was
crossed out and the door doors were covered with graffiti.
'COMPLICATED SITUATION'
Colau said municipal social workers had visited the building
and offered food aid to the people who lived there as well as information on
how to get medical care.
"We also know that there were coexistence problems and
that police on more than one occasion were called to the building," she
added. "It is a complicated situation."
Hours before the fire broke out, police were called to the
building because of a dispute among squatters but there is no evidence it was
related to the blaze, Catalonia's regional interior minister Joan Ignasi Elena
told reporters.
A spokesman for Catalonia's regional police force, the Mossos
d'Esquadra, said an investigation had been opened into the causes of the fire.
In December 2020, four people were killed after a blaze
ripped through an industrial complex occupied by squatters, many of them
African migrants, near Barcelona.
Over 100 squatters were believed to be living in precarious
conditions at the abandoned complex in Badalona, a suburban town north of the
city.
In addition to the four deaths, more than 20 people were
injured in the blaze.
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