At least 10 people died and 15 were injured in a fire that broke out early Friday in an inn that served as a shelter for homeless people in Porto Alegre, in the south of
Brazil, authorities reported.
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At the end of the day, seven people were still hospitalized, two of them “in serious condition,” he added. The governor of the state, Eduardo Leite, said on platform
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The director of Civil Defense in Porto Alegre, Evaldo Rodrigues de Oliveira, stated that the flames could have been caused. “Preliminarily, we are working with the hypothesis of an arson (…), an individual could have entered at dawn,” the official told the Globo network.
Firefighters went to the scene around 2 a.m. and managed to control the flames three hours later. The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, expressed in X his “sadness and concern” for the deceased and expressed his solidarity with the victims' relatives.
The three-story inn building was partially destroyed, AFP confirmed. Civil Defense evaluates structural damage, said its director. Meanwhile, its former occupants were authorized to remove some belongings from the property.which belongs to a network of low-cost inns in Porto Alegre.
Then they had to be taken to other shelters. The city's mayor, Sebastiao Melo, decreed three days of official mourning, as he wrote in homeless.
“Tragedy Foretold”
“It is necessary to investigate not only the fire, but the entire plot of an announced tragedy,” he noted in X. In 2013, the city of Santa Marta, also in Rio Grande do Sul, was the scene of a fire in a nightclub that left 242 dead.
Most of the victims died asphyxiated by the toxic cloud emitted by the flammable material on the roof of the premises, which lacked working fire extinguishers and with only two front doors to evacuate a crowd, according to the investigation.
. Almost nine years later, the justice system sentenced the four defendants to between 18 and 22 years in prison for that catastrophe, but those sentences were later annulled.
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