At least 13 people were killed on Sunday after a fire broke out in a nightclub in southeastern Spain, the authorities said, adding that the number of victims could rise.
The police and firefighters in Murcia, Spain, rushed to the Teatre nightclub after receiving reports of a fire around 6 a.m. local time. Most of those killed were concentrated in the same area of the nightclub, its upper floor, said José Ballesta, the city’s mayor.
Mr. Ballesta said that firefighters working at the site warned that the blaze had caused structural damage and that it was possible the building could collapse, even as emergency workers continued to search through the rubble for victims on Sunday afternoon.
“The conditions continue to be extremely difficult,” Mr. Ballesta told reporters at the scene of the fire. The teams “are working in hellish circumstances,” he said, adding they would seek to shore up the building to prevent parts of it from caving in.
The fire most likely broke out on Teatre’s ground floor, a spokesman for the Spanish National Police said. At least four people — two women, 22 and 25, and two men, 41 and 45 — were wounded in the fire after inhaling smoke, Murcia’s emergency service said earlier on Sunday.
Firefighters extinguished the blaze by midmorning before entering the building to try to find survivors, according to the emergency service. The authorities also set up a relief center to provide support for family members and others affected, Spanish police said in a statement.
Spanish authorities did not immediately indicate a cause for the fire. Investigative teams had been dispatched to the area in an effort to determine the fire’s origins, the National Police spokesman, Diego Seral, told the country’s public broadcaster, RTVE.
Murcia’s city government declared three days of official mourning to honor those killed in the fire, its mayor, José Ballesta, wrote on social media.
