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.''
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