Madrid, Friday

SIX Britons were among more than 20 guests taken to hospital today

after fire broke out in a hotel at the Majorca resort of Magaluf.

About 200 Britons, many of them elderly, were evacuated along with 360

other guests when the blaze started in the ground-floor salon of the

three-star Hotel Magaluf Park just after 4am.

Those taken to hospital were all suffering from smoke inhalation and

later released after treatment.

A 57-year-old Spanish woman was in a coma with serious head injuries

after falling from her second-floor bedroom as smoke poured through the

10-storey hotel.

The fire, believed to have been caused by a short circuit, took

firemen an hour to extinguish. Smoke damage to the rest of the 400-room

hotel was extensive and guests were later taken to other hotels.

Mr Brian Readett, 54, a roofing contractor from Dunnholme, near

Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, was on the third day of a two-week golfing

holiday with 16 other members of his local golf club.

He said: ''It was the middle of the night when all the alarms went

off.

''There was a hell of a lot of smoke and quite a bit of panic. Many of

the people at the hotel were elderly and they were frightened.''