Brazil mourns nightclub fire victims

An investigation is under way into a fire that killed at least 231 people and injured 200 others after a pyrotechnics malfunction at a nightclub in the southern Brazilian city of Santa Maria, officials say.

Police Major Cleberson Braida Bastianello said officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium after the blaze erupted early on Sunday.

Bastianello said that they lowered the toll from 245 earlier believed killed at the Kiss nightclub. The identification process of the bodies had been completed by early on Monday.

Major Gerson da Rosa Ferreira, who was leading rescue efforts at the scene for the military police, said the victims died of asphyxiation or from being trampled, and there were as many as 500 people inside the club when the fire broke out.

The nightclub, which is near a college campus, was full of teenagers and people in their 20s, attending a concert and university party.

Initial investigations, she reported, suggested that there was only a single exit door in the crowded nightclub, and that in the confusion immediately after the fire broke out, it was initially barred by staff.

Authorities also say that many of those who died were between 16 and 20 years old, and were reportedly allowed inside the club even though they were underage, Bo reported. 

The fire led Dilma Roussef, Brazil's president, to cancel a series of meetings she had scheduled at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Chile's capital of Santiago, and head to Santa Maria, according to the Brazilian foreign ministry.

"It is a tragedy for all of us. I am not going to continue in the meeting [in Chile] for very clear reasons,'' she said before arriving in Santa Maria, where she met with families of the victims.

Santa Maria is near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay, some 300km west of the state capital of Porto Alegre.

Luiza Sousa, a civil police official in Santa Maria, told the Reuters news agency the blaze started when a member of the band or its production team ignited a flare, which then set fire to the ceiling. The fire spread "in seconds", Sousa said.

Sandro Meinerz, a police inspector, told the Agencia Estado news agency that manslaughter charges could be filed against the band, at least one of whom died in the fire, or their crew.

Television images showed black smoke billowing out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and exterior walls to free those trapped inside.

Bodies of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done; officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within minutes.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance".