By Xinhua
Vienna : Eleven people were killed Friday in a fire that broke out in a home for the elderly in a western Austrian town, officials said.
Twenty-five people, including 23 residents and two carers, were in the building when the fire broke out in the town of Egg, said Thomas Mair, a spokesman for the Vorarlberg provincial government.
“There are 11 dead and six injured — three of them seriously,”Mair said, adding that the fire started in a room on the first floor at the back of the building.
The whole building was engulfed in flames and billows of heavy smoke could be seen around the building, witnesses said.
It took the 250-strong firefighters three hours to finally put out the fire and investigation for its cause was still underway.
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer arrived in Egg late Friday in the wake of the accident, which caused the biggest death toll in a blaze in Austria since 2000, the Austria Press Agency reported.
“It is a catastrophe, completely terrible,” the news agency quoted Gusenbauer as saying.
A total of 155 people were killed when a funicular train caught fire in a tunnel in the ski resort Kaprun in November 2000.