Fire kill 39 In Detention Facility in Mexico

Dozens of people were killed and injured after a fire started in an immigration detention facility in northern Mexico near the US border.

The blaze occurred late Monday at a facility in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Images from the scene showed ambulances, firefighters and vans from the morgue around the smoke-covered facility with rows of bodies lying under shimmery silver sheets.

Injured people were taken to hospitals, said Mexico’s National Immigration Institute in a statement. “The facility was holding 68 adult men from Central and South America,” it said.

Mexico’s attorney general’s office launched an inquiry and has investigators at the scene, according to media reports.

Vinagly, a Venezuelan woman, stood outside the immigration centre, desperate for information about her 27-year-old husband detained there.

“He was taken away in an ambulance,” she told AFP news agency. “They ‘immigration officials’ don’t tell you anything. A family member can die and they don’t tell you he’s dead.”

The governmental National Human Rights Commission had been called in to help the migrants. The agency said that it “energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy” without any further explanation of what those actions might have been.

Ciudad Juarez is a major crossing point for people entering the United States. Its shelters are full of migrants and refugees waiting for opportunities to cross, or who have requested asylum in the US and are waiting out the process.

Aljazeera /Shakirat Sadiq