Witnesses to the burned nightclubs in Murcia agree that there were no alarms or emergency lights

The fire that destroyed two nightclubs in Murcia on October 1 and caused the death of 13 people was extremely fast and there were no alarms or emergency lights, as explained this Friday by half a dozen witnesses who were in the rooms on the night of the tragedy to the judge investigating the case.

“Everything happened in less than three or four minutes, it was the blink of an eye,” Richard U., one of the people who was at Fonda Milagros that fateful day, told reporters at the end of the hearing.

That night he had been livening up the place, with a Latin atmosphere, playing percussion, and he said that, at one point, he entered the bathroom and, when he left, the entire room was already filled with smoke and employees and customers were shouting that they had to leave. .

He was on the ground floor and saw a fire extinguisher, he grabbed it and tried to go up with it to the boxes, where the smoke was coming from, without being aware that the fire, which the police believe broke out in the adjoining room, Theater was already completely out of control.

In fact, the percussionist admits that he was only able to climb the stairs to the boxes and decided to go back down: “There was blue and black smoke, the power went out, I was short of breath,” he recalled, and pointed out that he had to go through everything one day hospitalized because of the smoke he had breathed.

That night, Valeria C., another of the people who testified this Friday, was in one of those boxes.

Her memory of her tragedy coincides with what other clients of Fonda Milagros also told the judge last week: no one gave notice in the upper boxes that there was a fire and that the room had to be evacuated.

No alarms sounded, nor were there emergency lights.

The power went out in the nightclub and the smoke made it impossible to see anything.

“You think about family and getting out no matter what, looking for a way out.

It's very hard, it's difficult to explain in words.

It is horrible and very hard,” she told reporters at the courthouse door.

She was the last to leave the box area, which she occupied with five other friends.

All of them are represented by lawyer Rosa Egea, who also defends the family of one of the deceased and for the moment she has preferred not to make statements.

Sources present at the hearings this Friday have confirmed to EL PAÍS that among the witnesses cited was one of the access control workers at the Teatre nightclub, where the fire allegedly started.

He himself, upon detecting the fire, notified other employees in the room by earpiece to begin the evacuation.

That nightclub emptied several minutes before Fonda Milagros, a time that police reports consider crucial, since the delay in the evacuation of the latter premises made it difficult for customers to leave.

The worker has also confirmed, according to the same sources, that no alarm sounded, and has said that he was unaware that Teatre had a rear emergency exit.

The firefighters, in the expert report sent to the judge, reported that this rear exit was blocked with padlocks and bars that they had to force to access the room.

The witnesses who testified this Friday were the last people summoned by the judge so far in the investigation phase, in which she has also heard the versions of the six people who are accused of 13 alleged crimes of reckless homicide: three responsible de Teatre, the DJ who organized the party that was being held that night at the club, the owner of the spark machine, whose negligent use the police consider to be the cause of the fire, and the owner of Fonda Milagros.

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