TUGUEGARAO (Philippines) - A FIRE tore through a budget hotel, rousing some guests and trapping others in upper floor bathrooms on Sunday in the northern Philippines. Many of the 15 dead and 12 injured were nursing students in town to take a licensing exam, police said.
Some firefighters wept and prayed as they retrieved badly burned bodies. Grieving relatives converged at a morgue where remains of victims, 14 burned beyond recognition, were brought. Some fainted as body bags were brought into a funeral parlour.
'Their families spent fortunes to send these children to school only to see them end that way,' fire investigator Daniel Abana said.
The fire raged for eight hours early on Sunday and gutted the five-story Bed and Breakfast Pension House in Cagayan province's capital of Tuguegarao city.
Dozens of guests, roused by the commotion, were rescued by firefighters and police or reached safety on their own, Mr Abana said.
Many of the dead had crammed in bathrooms on the top two floors. One victim had a foot stuck out of a window in a desperate attempt to survive, he said. -- AP
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