A fire that began when an actor knocked over a candle on the set of a play ripped through a crowded theatre in the central Egyptian city of Beni Suef late on Monday, sparking a stampede of audience members and killing at least 29 people, survivors and officials said.
The fire spread quickly across the set, which was made entirely of paper and had been ringed with numerous candles. Panicked audience members trampled each other trying to get out the one available exit door, which at one point was partially blocked by a piece of wood that fell during the blaze, survivors said.
“Everyone was trying to save themselves and they were falling all over each other,” said Mohammed Arafat Yassin (27), recovering at Beni Suef hospital. “It was like being inside a barbeque grill. Everyone was burning.”
The blaze broke out in the Culture Palace, a facility run by the culture ministry, on a downtown street of Beni Suef, a farming town of 200 000 people about 95km south of Cairo. The cultural centre was on the third day of a nine-day theatre festival featuring plays performed by troupes from around Egypt.
About 1 000 people were watching a theatre group from the nearby region of Fayoum performing a play called Grab Your Dreams when the fire broke out at about 11.45pm.
The play was set in a zoo, and the stage was done up like a cave inside one of the animal cages. The ceiling, floor and walls were covered with paper bags painted to resemble stone, and in the middle of the stage was a “mountain” also made of paper. There were candles set up all over the set, survivors said.
In the final scene, one of the actors was shaking another character to wake him up, and the movement knocked over one of the candles, said Yassin, a lawyer who was also the director of the play.
“The room became engulfed in flames. The flames were like an ocean spreading across the theatre,” said another survivor, Mohammed el-Amrousi (23), an acting student from the northern city of Alexandria.
The bodies of at least 29 people were brought to the morgue at Beni Suef’s main hospital, where 37 injured were also being treated, hospital director Ahmed el-Sharqawi said. One police official put the toll of injured as high as 60.
The small, four-storey hospital was overwhelmed, with rooms crammed with severely burned victims. El-Sharqawi said most of the injured had burns over 30% to 90% of their bodies. He did not say how many of the dead died from the stampede and how many from the fire itself. There were some reports that many in the audience were families, but there was no immediate breakdown on the ages of the victims.
The tragedy was the deadliest fire in Egypt since a blaze tore through a crowded passenger train on February 20 2002 south of Cairo, killing 370 people.
Yassin said there were only two exit doors from the theatre, but one of them was covered in the same paper as the set and was in flames. The crowd rushed for the other. As they streamed out, a piece of wood fell, partially blocking it. He and some others managed to climb around it, but it slowed the escape, he said.
Several hours after the blaze, the cultural centre building was left a burned-out concrete husk with blackened walls. The centre is used for numerous cultural events, including exhibitions and plays.
Many teenagers and children were among Monday night’s audience, said a police lieutenant who was at the scene during the fire.
“There were so many people screaming and crying, falling over each other trying to get out,” the lieutenant said. He said he went into the building after firefighters got the blaze under control within about 45 minutes.
“I saw bodies everywhere. It was a great shock to see so many dead people,” said the lieutenant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writer Nadia Abou el-Magd contributed to this report from Cairo, Egypt
