At least 17 people died in a Caracas club when a person activated a teargas grenade inside, Venezuela's interior minister Nestor Reverol says.
A relative of one of the victims of the night club where a tear gas grenade was detonated waits outside the morgue in Caracas. Photo: AFP
More than 500 people were at a party at the Los Cotorros club in the middle-class El Paraiso neighbourhood when the device went off at about 3am on Saturday during a fight between several people, causing a stampede towards the exits, Reverol said on state television.
Eleven people suffocated to death when the gas filled the club's confined space, said Noris Villanueva, an autopsy assistant at the local Perez Carreno Hospital, who examined their bodies. It was not clear how the other six died.
Eight of those who died were younger than 18 and five people were injured, Reverol said.
Authorities had arrested seven people and the investigation was ongoing, Reverol said.
"The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, led by President Nicolas Maduro, deplores this unfortunate event. We send our condolences to the families."
The club, a two-storey red brick building, was empty later on Saturday morning and there was no police presence outside.
"We haven't received a response from anybody, neither from the police nor the doctors," Nilson Guerra, the father of one victim, said at the hospital.
He only knew his 19-year-old son Luis had died because he had seen him in the morgue. Another one of his sons had been hospitalised.
- Reuters