Nine bodies have been found in the ruins of a 14-storey apartment building destroyed by fire in Valencia, Spanish firefighters and forensic authorities said.
Authorities had previously announced that 10 people had died but later announced that one person was missing.
The building’s exterior cladding and strong winds are believed to have caused the building to be engulfed in flames within minutes.
Officials refused to answer questions about the cause of the fire.
Three days of mourning will be observed.
It is believed that the fire spread to the fourth floor of the larger of the two 14-storey buildings, was destroyed within minutes, and then spread to adjacent floors.
Firefighters were unable to reach above the 12th floor as the flames burned at an alarming rate through the cladding below the very thin aluminium layer attached to the building.
Valencia’s College of Industrial Engineers said this, along with strong winds and high temperatures in Valencia on Thursday night, was one of the possible causes of the fire.
“The reason [the building] burned so quickly is because of this type of cladding,” said Esther Puchades, vice president of the university, who has previously toured the building.
Aluminium-coated panels were not considered combustible, but this type of cladding was allowed by building regulations at the time of the building’s completion in 2008 but has since been banned.
However, there is no program to remove banned cladding, which occurred in the UK after the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, and work is still ongoing.
All that remained when investigators searched inside were the charred husks of his two adjoining buildings in the Campenaar district.
On Friday, we had to use the drone until the temperatures cooled down.
Smoke could still be seen rising from the roof of the destroyed apartment building.