Seventeen teenagers burned to death, trapped behind padlocked emergency exits, when fire swept through a crowded nightclub outside Buenos Aires early Monday, police said.
With the rear doors locked, the main entrance was the only exit available to the hundreds of youths celebrating their high school graduation, Mayor Enrique Garcia of the Buenos Aires suburb of Vicente Lopez told local radio."We thought the smoke was coming from one of those special-effects machines," said one of the survivors. "Everyone kept dancing without realizing until the smoke became unbearable. No one thought it was a fire."
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The fire was thought to have been started by a firecracker or a cigarette butt.