By IRNA
Vienna : Eleven people were killed when a fire swept through a retirement home in the western Austrian town of Egg on Friday.
One official said 23 residents and two carers were in the building when the fire started.
“This is a catastrophe. It is awful,” Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer told reporters in Egg, a town with a population of about 3,500.
Firefighters were now investigating the cause of the blaze, said a spokesman for the regional government of Vorarlberg.
The head of the firefighters in Egg, Markus Natter, told the Austrian broadcaster ORF that “the biggest problem was the smoke and people could simply not get out through the stairwell.”
The death toll was the biggest in a blaze in Austria since 155 people were killed when a funicular train in Kaprun caught fire in a tunnel in November 2000.