Within a day, 2 fire tragedies that involve public area / transport killed more than 50 persons.
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29 children die in Mexico daycare center blaze (5/06/09)
At least 29 children died, including many who were asphixiated after a fire raced through a daycare center in the northwestern Mexican border state of Sonora, local police said.
“We’re still bringing bodies out,” a spokesman for the local prosecutor’s office, Jose Larrinaga, said shortly beforehand.
Radio reports said there were many newborn babies in part of the center where the fire cause the roof to collapse.
Local media reported that 176 children had been in the ABC daycare center when the fire broke out at around 3pm (4am Malaysian time) in state capital Hermosillo.
State investigators rushed to the scene, following firefighters, Red Cross workers and police, according to the police statement.
Local press said that city residents also helped out in the face of the rapidly growing disaster.
The origin of the blaze was unclear early Friday evening.
30 children with serious burns
Local media suggested it had started in a neighboring tire shop, a claim the owners rapidly denied, according to news reports.
Medics transferred five children who had been identified by their parents to Sonora State children’s hospital, a medical worker told AFP.
At least 30 children with serious burns were transferred overnight to a specialized hospital across the border in Arizona, according to El Imparcial daily.
The daycare center belonged to Mexico’s social security network, the Mexican presidency said in a statement which expressed President Felipe Calderon’s “profound pain.”
Calderon called on the national social security director, Daniel Karam Toumeh, to personally visit families and injured children at the scene, it added.
The federal government sent three air ambulances and more than a dozen specialized doctors to the scene, the statement said.
State Governor Eduardo Bours was in Arizona when the fire broke out and traveled to Hermosillo in the evening.
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Dozens dead in China bus fire (5/06/09)
At least 25 people have been killed after a bus caught fire in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.
According to state news agency Xinhua, the bus caught fire in rush hour traffic at 8am (00:00 GMT) on Friday.
Local authorities said that 76 people were injured in the blaze, 27 of them seriously.
State broadcaster CCTV cited witnesses as saying the sealed, air-conditioned bus caught fire without an explosion, and then burned rapidly.
Like many vehicles in Chengdu, the bus ran on natural gas rather than gasoline.
Officials said more than 10 passengers managed to escape the burning vehicle.
Pictures & videos posted online and shown on state television showed thick black smoke and flames pouring from the bus on the side of a busy highway. One badly burned woman was shown lying on the road with a man standing nearby, his clothes burned off.
One badly burned woman was seen lying on the road with a man, his clothes burnt off, standing near her.
A report on a website run by the Sichuan provincial government said the cause of the blaze was still being investigated.
(Source : Al Jazeera Net & MSNBC)
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