SANTA MARIA, Brazil — The first funerals began before dawn Monday for the more than 230 people killed after a fire ignited by a band’s pyrotechnics spectacle swept through a nightclub filled with hundreds of university students early Sunday in this city in southern Brazil.
One of the club’s owners and two band members were arrested for questioning, investigator Ranolfo Vieira Jr. said, adding that they could be held for several days.
The newspaper O Globo said on its website that a fourth person had surrendered to police.
Vieira declined to identify those detained, but the Brazilian newspaper Zero Hora quotes lawyer Jader Marques saying his client Elissandro Spohr, a co-owner of the club, had been held. O Globo reported that the fourth person detained was another club coowner.
Family members of those killed in the blaze cautiously welcomed the news.
“I’m burying my wife today,” said Leandro Buss, 35, whose wife, Marilene Castro, 33, died at the club.
Buss was among the dozens of families grieving among coffins lined up in a municipal gymnasium in Santa Maria.
“We’ll see who was responsible for this,” said Buss, a computer technician, staring at the ground. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll see some justice since so many people were killed.”
Officials revised the death toll downward overnight, according to news agency reports, to 231 from 233 - most killed by smoke inhalation. More than 100 people remained hospitalized for smoke, local officials said.
National Health Minister Alexandre Padilha cautioned that the death toll could worsen dramatically because 75 of those injured were in critical condition and could die.
Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a doctor helping coordinate the emergency response, said people who were inside the cluband thought they made it out safely had started to turn up at area hospitals with symptoms of smoke inhalation, which he said can take hours or even days to appear. He estimated that about 15 people sought out help Monday afternoon and said some have had to be intubated.
The disaster in Santa Maria, a city of about 260,000 residents known for its cluster of universities, was one of the deadliest nightclub fires in history. President Dilma Rousseff left a summit meeting in Chile to meet with survivors, and the government declared three days of mourning.
The circumstances surrounding the blaze, including reports that guards briefly blocked the exit, immediately raised questions about whether the club’s owners had been negligent and whether enforcement of safety measures was lacking.
Witnesses said the fire started about 2 a.m. after the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, began performing at the club, Kiss, for an audience made up mostly of students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs at a local university.
Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student at the University of Caxias do Sul who was at the club, said the band’s singer lit a kind of flare and held it over his ahead, accidentally setting the ceiling on fire.
The band’s guitarist, Rodrigo Martins, said the band had played about five songs when he saw that the ceiling was on fire.
“A guard passed us a fire extinguisher,” he said. “The singer tried to use it, but it wasn’t working.”
He confirmed that the band’s accordion player, Danilo Jacques, 28, died but said five other members made it out safely.
Information for this article was contributed by Simon Romero, Lis Horta Moriconi and Jill Langlois of The New York Times and by Juliana Barbassa, Marco Sibaja, Stan Lehman, Bradley Brooks and Jenny Barchfield of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 01/29/2013