BANGKOK – A fire at a Bangkok nightclub killed 59 people and injured about 200 as people celebrating the new year stampeded out of the burning building, police said yesterday.
The cause of the fire was under investigation, with witnesses saying it was caused by fireworks and media reporting it was due to an electrical fault.
Prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva visited the injured at one hospital and at the charred building, saying firecrackers should not have been brought inside the club.
Forensic experts were unable to identify at least 30 bodies, as they had no identification documents with them, doctors said, adding it would take them at least a week. Foreigners treated in hospitals included people from Japan, Australia, the Netherlands and France, police said.
Although details were sketchy, witnesses said clubbers were given sparklers shortly before midnight and, as soon as clocks heralded the start of 2009, fireworks started going off inside the dance area, sparking a fire.
“We were all dancing and suddenly there was a big flame that came out of the front of the stage and everybody was running away,” partygoer Oh Benjamas said on the street outside the smouldering wreckage of the Santika club. “People started running for the doors and breaking the windows.”
Dozens of bodies wrapped in white cotton sheets lay on the pavement outside, as fire crews moved in to douse the embers of the club on Ekkamai, a street popular with foreign revellers and high-society Thais.
Many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition and the blaze had completely gutted the building. Rescue teams used pick-up trucks to ferry bodies from the scene.
Thanat Wongsanga, a neighbourhood police official, said the cause of the blaze had not yet been determined. Local media said an electrical fault was probably to blame.
The health ministry’s emergency centre said 59 people had been killed and some 200 people had been injured.
Most of the victims died of suffocation or severe burns, it said.
Among the most critical was a 25-year-old Japanese man who suffered 40 per cent burns on his body and was in an intensive-care unit.
Bangkok’s nightspots, some of which can accommodate several thousand people, have often been the subject of safety concerns, although they have been incident-free for the last five years.
The Thai capital was hit two years ago on New Year’s Eve by a series of small explosions in which several people were killed and dozens injured.
The blasts were blamed variously on fallout from the 2006 coup against prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and Muslim militants who have waged a separatist rebellion in Thailand’s southernmost provinces since 2003. – (Reuters)