Sixteen residents, including women and children, were killed in the central Philippines on Monday when a fire swept through a residential building in a shanty community.
The fire in Bacolod city started after midnight local time as people were sleeping and rapidly spread because of strong winds. The blaze gutted the wooden two-storey apartment building and more than 60 nearby shanties, according to an emergency services spokesperson.
Several people leapt from windows at the height of the fire but others failed to wake up in time to save themselves, he said. The building housed impoverished families, including men and women who worked as vendors at a nearby public market, officials said. Relatives identified all the dead, as their bodies were placed in black bags and lined up side by side in a clearing near the still-smouldering slum community.
An investigation was under way to determine the cause of the fire that started on the ground floor.