Authorities in the Dominican Republic on Thursday ended their search for bodies trapped in the Jet Set nightclub, where a roof collapsed during a concert, killing 221 people.
Although officials had repeatedly declined to say how many people were inside the club, on Thursday they said that with 221 fatalities and 189 people rescued, everyone had been accounted for.
“The country mourns,” Juan Manuel Méndez, the director of the emergency operations center, said in making the announcement. “The Dominican family mourns.”
After several days of repeated media briefings day and night, Mr. Méndez paused for nearly a minute and broke down sobbing.
“Thank you, my Lord, because today we concluded the most difficult task that I have had in 20 years heading the operations center,” he said between tears. “I ask forgiveness, because every time a person reported a missing family member, we were filled with helplessness knowing that the person was still trapped, and we hadn’t been able to reach them.”
Colleagues consoled Mr. Méndez, and he passed the microphone to others to finish the news conference.
In a brief telephone interview afterward with The Times, Mr. Méndez said he ended the search operation and turned the building over to prosecutors for their investigation. No missing people remain unaccounted for, he said.
“Not a single body remains there,” Mr. Méndez said. “We combed the entire area.”
The roof at one of the Dominican Republic’s most popular discos, Jet Set, caved in early Tuesday during a concert.
Representatives of the club have declined to say how many tickets were sold for the concert Monday night. The nightclub had a capacity of 700 to 1,000 people and was particularly popular on Monday nights.
Mr. Méndez had said officials had triangulated the number of tickets sold with the number of people at the morgue and in local hospitals.
On Wednesday night, the authorities had announced that the operation officially shifted from search and rescue to the recovery of bodies.
The more than 300 rescuers had “exhausted all reasonable possibilities” of finding anyone alive, the government said in a statement.
Monday night at Jet Set was a decades-old tradition in Santo Domingo, popular with athletes, politicians and the business class — and that was reflected in the fatalities: A governor died, as did a family of prominent bankers and two former Major League Baseball players.
The body of the merengue singer who was performing, Rubby Pérez, was pulled out of the wreckage Wednesday morning.
“This hurts so much,” Mr. Méndez said.
Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting.
