A blaze in a Buenos Aires nightclub packed with young revelers celebrating the New Year holidays killed at least 175 people and injured 619, as a stampeding crowd was trapped by locked exit doors.
The blaze is thought to have been caused by a flare fired into the club's ceiling during a rock concert, sending burning debris onto the crowd of up to 4,000 people who desperately fought to flee the flames and suffocating smoke.
The blaze, which officials called one of Argentina's worst disasters, may have claimed more victims because four of the club's six doors were tied shut with wire, according to Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez.
Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez
"It appears they were condemned to walk into a trap," Ms Fernandez said.
Mayor Anibal Ibarra said the emergency exit appeared to be shut "so that people wouldn't enter without paying" and firefighters had to break it open.
Most of the victims are believed to have died from smoke inhalation.
The rock band playing at the Republica Cromagnon club in the gritty, run-down neighborhood of Once warned the crowd not to shoot flares due to the fire hazard, the mayor said. But after the first song, an hour before midnight, a group fired one into the highly flammable foam ceiling.
Flares and a whole array of fireworks are sold on streets all over Latin America for the New Year holiday festivities with little regulation.
Lists at hospitals showed that most of the victims were in their teens and 20s, but there were also children as young as six among the dead and injured.
Police said the fire was extinguished quickly, but rescue workers spent a few hours removing people on stretchers from inside the club. Television showed pictures of the bodies lying on the sidewalks outside the club.
The blaze was the worst in the Americas since a supermarket fire in neighboring Paraguay last August killed nearly 400 people. The owners are accused of closing the doors after the fire broke out to stop looting.
Many other fires have occurred in Latin America in recent years because of fireworks. Exactly three years ago, more than 300 people were killed when a fire roared through a crowded shopping area in the Peruvian capital Lima. The blaze started with an explosion at a shop selling fireworks for New Year parties.