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Four arrests over Brazil club inferno

Family members mourn one of the victims.
Family members mourn one of the victims.

Four people have been arrested over the blaze that killed more than 200 people in a Brazilian nightclub over the weekend.

A co-owner of the Kiss nightclub handed himself in to police on Monday afternoon for questioning.

Earlier, police held another owner of the club, a member of the band Gurizada Fandangueira and its security chief.

The death toll now stands at 231 in the fire at the club in Santa Maria, a university town of about 260,000 people in southern Brazil. Many of the victims were less than 20 years old.

The band used pyrotechnics in their act. Police think they ignited insulation on the ceiling, with up to 2,000 people packed inside.

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins said the band started playing at 2.15am “and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning.

“It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It’s harmless we never had any trouble with it.”

Witnesses have reported a fire extinguisher did not work and that there was only one exit. Many of the dead were also found in the club’s two toilets, where they fled apparently because the blinding smoke caused them to believe the doors were exits.

“It was terrible inside it was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another,” police inspector Sandro Meinerz said.

“We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take the bodies away.”

Survivors said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night.

Firefighters initially had trouble getting inside the nightclub because “there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance,” Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city’s fire department, said.