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Fire on oil plant off Mexico's coast
Photo: Tribuna de Campeche / EPA
Five workers were killed in a fire on an oil platform off the coast of Mexico.
Two more were missing and six people were injured, as the state oil company Pemex announced on Monday.
Only after hours could the flames be brought under control.
The fire was probably unintentional on Sunday in the facility at the Ku-Maloob-Zaap oil field in the Gulf of Mexico - around 100 kilometers from the city of Ciudad del Carmen - when planned maintenance work was being carried out.
There is still no information about possible environmental damage.
The incident is being investigated, said the general manager of the highly indebted company, Octavio Romero, in Mexico City.
Operations in the facility's 125 wells have been suspended, reducing production 421,000 barrels of crude oil per day, according to Romero.
He ruled out a failure due to a lack of investment as the cause of the fire.
Always incidents in the Gulf
The company has a history of incidents.
It was only at the beginning of July that a gas leak in an underwater pipeline in Ku-Maloob-Zaap caused a sensational fire on the sea surface.
The flames were seen near an oil rig on the surface of the water.
At that time, lightning strikes during a storm were named as a possible cause.
According to Pemex, it took more than five hours for the fire to be completely extinguished using nitrogen.
Nobody was injured, it said.
The Mexican raw materials authority ASEA announced that no oil had spilled into the sea.
The accident occurred on the southern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the US coast in 2010, causing one of the largest natural disasters in decades.
At the time, the marine protection agency NOAA estimated that nearly 800,000 liters of oil had leaked out of several leaks every day.
jok / dpa