Hundreds die in China disco blaze

Hundreds were said to be trapped in the building

More than 300 people have been killed in a fire which swept through a dance hall packed with Christmas partygoers in the central Chinese city of Luoyang.

Eyewitness reports spoke of horrendous scenes in the disco on the top floor of the building as dancers realised they could not escape and began to panic.

When fire broke out, the whole dance hall was suddenly thrown into chaos

Survivor

Local residents said exits in the building, a maze of shops and narrow corridors, were blocked by boxes of merchandise.

Builders doing renovation work on the lower floors were also trapped by the flames.

An unconfirmed report says the building had failed a safety inspection only a week ago.

Safety mats

The official Xinhua news agency said the fire had broken out at 2135 (1335 GMT) on Monday and was extinguished in the early hours of Tuesday.

Some were too afraid to jump to safety

It put the death toll at 309; among the dead were 135 males and 174 females.

It was China's worst fire tragedy since December 1994, when 324 people, most of them children, were killed in a concert hall in the western region of Xinjiang.

One partygoer, her face covered in smoke, said she and five or six others jumped to safety, but she did not know if her husband had escaped.

Firefighters direct a water jet to the sixth-floor disco

Television reports showed others refusing to leap down to the safety mats laid out by firefighters.

Most of those who died in the disco suffocated to death, officials said.

Christmas is not a holiday in China, but some young people celebrate it anyway.

Billowing smoke

Investigators have been sifting through the wreckage at the scene of the fire to try to establish its cause.

The shopping centre had been undergoing refurbishment, and one theory is that the fire was caused by the construction work.

It is believed to have started in the basement of the building, and then spread upwards.

After an hour and a half, it had engulfed the upper storeys and black smoke was billowing from windows shattered by the heat.

Firefighters who attempted to enter the disco were forced to turn back because of the smoke.

Building standards

Luoyang is an ancient city on the Yellow River in the province of Henan, which has undergone rapid growth in recent years.

Earlier this year a fire at an illegal cinema in Henan left 74 dead.

BBC Beijing correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes says that building safety standards in China are seldom properly enforced.