EGYPT: Egyptian investigators were looking into possible breaches of fire-code regulations yesterday after a blaze swept through a crowded theatre, killing 32 people.
Survivors said only one exit was open as the audience stampeded in panic.
The blaze was believed to have begun when an actor knocked over a candle, settling alight a paper-filled set during a production on Monday night at a government-run culture centre in Beni Suef, a farming town south of Cairo.
Egypt's health minister, Mohammed Awad Tag Eddin, said he expected an investigation to examine why so many people died.
Prosecutors were inspecting the theatre today, security officials said. The concrete building was left a charred husk. Blackened bodies remained at the morgue at the town's main hospital.
The building, called the Culture Palace and run by the Culture Ministry, sits on a downtown street of Beni Suef, a town of 200,000 people about 60 miles south of Cairo.
The cultural centre was on the third day of a nine-day theatre festival featuring plays by troupes from around Egypt.
"The room became engulfed in flames.
"The flames were like an ocean spreading across the theatre," said a survivor, Mohammed el-Amrousi (23), an acting student from the northern city of Alexandria.
In all, the theatre had two exit doors, but one was covered in the same paper as the set and was in flames, so the crowd rushed for the other, said Mohammed Arafat Yassin (27), recovering at Beni Suef hospital.
He and some others managed to climb around the piece of wood blocking the remaining exit door, but it slowed the escape, he said.
Sixty people were injured, 18 of them in critical condition.
The tragedy was the deadliest fire in Egypt since a blaze tore through a crowded passenger train on February 20th, 2002, south of Cairo, killing 370 people.