A fire at a nightclub in Kočani, North Macedonia, where a concert was being held on Sunday night killed 51 people and injured more than 100, Interior Minister Panče Toškovski said.
He said some people had been detained and that the fire was most likely caused by a spark that ignited the club’s ceiling.
The MIA news agency earlier reported that at least 50 people had died at a nightclub in Kočani in the east of the country, about 100 kilometers from the capital Skopje, where about 1,500 people were attending a concert.
According to the agency, the fire destroyed the Pulse nightclub in the city of about 30,000 people during a concert by DNK, a very popular hip hop group in the country.
The audience at the concert, which started at midnight, was mainly young, according to the same source.
Local media reports that Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski, Minister of the Interior Panče Toškovski, as well as the director of the Center for Crisis Management and the director of the Office for Public Safety visited the site of the accident in Kočani.
According to the SDK news website, the fire broke out around 3 am.
The fire was probably caused by the use of pyrotechnics for lighting effects at the concert, local media reports.
Videos posted on social media show a building with a burnt roof and an entrance blackened by flames.
The SDK also claims that “more than a hundred young people have been injured”, citing the Directorate for Protection and Rescue and the Center for Crisis Management.
The injured were transported to hospitals in Kočani and Štip, about thirty kilometers south of Kočani, and to Skopje, according to the website.
Twenty-seven injured people were admitted to the surgical clinic “Naum Ohridski” in Skopje, Nebojša Nastov, a doctor at that institution, told SDK.
In September 2021, in the previous major fire to hit the country, 14 people died in a unit for Covid-19 patients in Tetovo.
