A fire tore through a nightclub in North Macedonia early on Sunday, killing 59 people, apparently after onstage fireworks set the venue ablaze, authorities said, announcing arrest warrants for four people.
They said 155 injured people in the small town of Kocani had been taken to hospitals across the country, 18 of them in critical condition. Some of the serious cases were to be taken to other European countries for treatment.
The head of the Kocani hospital, Kristina Serafimovska, said the patients being treated there were aged between 14 and 25.
“Seventy of the patients have burns and carbon monoxide poisoning,” she said.
The blaze started in the Club Pulse around 3am (0200 GMT), when the place was packed with more than 1,000 mostly young fans attending a concert by a popular hip-hop duo called DNK.
“Initially we didn’t believe there was a fire. Then there was huge panic in the crowd and a stampede to get out,” a young woman who was at the concert told local media outside a hospital in the capital Skopje.