Fire in Slovak dormitory claims lives of nine

Nine people died in the fire that hit a local dormitory for poor families on Friday, regional police director Frantisek Posluch told journalists, adding that there are no other victims among the burnt-down ruins.

Polsuch said the firefighters and the police have ended the rescue works at the place of the accident.

In addition to seven victims the firefighters uncovered on Friday, another two were found today by which the overall death toll rose to nine.

We’ve found a total of nine burnt corpses. This means two people are missing. Their presence in the burnt-down site is ruled out. The search has been ended therefore," Posluch said.

The police has launched a search for the two missing persons.

The fire broke out in the dormitory after midnight on Friday. In terms of the number of victims it is one of the worst disasters in Slovakia in the past years.

Some residents of the house, consisting of small flats, saved their lives by jumping out of windows. Several of them have ended up in hospital with serious injuries, however.
The survivors assert that someone set the fire deliberately and that racial motive was behind the alleged arson.

The dormitory’s inhabitants included Romanies who often become a target of extremists’ attacks.

The police, however, have dismissed the information about the fire being set on purpose.

"Up to now the investigation has by no means confirmed either wilful fault or any other racially-motivated crime," Posluch said this morning.

At a press conference earlier this afternoon he said that the fire began "in the central or on the edge parts inside the building, therefore a deliberate act can be ruled out unambiguously."

The cause of the fire is not known as yet, he said.

Two men and two women have been found among the victims. The remaining bodies have been burnt down to an extent preventing their identification.

The police have no information about who the individual victims are. No children have been found among them, Posluch said.

The firefighters are removing the burnt-down ruins of the building.

The municipality reportedly wants to build a new dormitory, made of bricks, not of flammable cells like the previous one.