At least 23 people have been killed, including ten children, and dozens of others injured in an apartment building fire in New York City, according to city officials and US media.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed that 19 people had died in the blaze that broke out about 11am (16:00 GMT) on Sunday in the Twin Parks apartment building in the Bronx area of the city.
The 19-storey tower provided affordable housing and had a large community of people of Gambian origin.
“This is a horrific, horrific, painful moment for the city of New York,” Adams told reporters. “The numbers are horrific.”
Nine of the dead were children, the Associated Press news agency reported, citing a city official.
Earlier on Sunday, officials said 32 people had been admitted to hospital with life-threatening injuries with some 60 people injured as smoke drifted through the building on a cold winter morning.
The fire started from a portable electric heater in the bedroom of one of the apartments, officials said.
The smoke spread to every floor of the building, probably because the door to the apartment had been left open, the city’s fire department commissioner Daniel Nigro told reporters at a news briefing.
“Members found victims on every floor in stairwells and were taking them out in cardiac and respiratory arrest,” Nigro said.
At a makeshift shelter on Sunday evening, Frantz Sannon was rushing to see his parents, who had been living on the fourth floor of the building for years.
Sannon, 45, said they must have left their phones in the apartment because he was not able to reach them after learning about the fire.
“I can’t wait to get to speak to them right now,” he told Reuters news agency before entering the school.
The fire is the second deadly blaze in public housing complex in the US in a week and looks likely to stir questions on safety standards such buildings.
The building did not have external fire escapes, and residents were meant to evacuate through interior stairways, Nigro said. “I think some of them could not escape because of the volume of smoke,” he said.
Some 200 firefighters helped put out the blaze, and some ran out of oxygen in their tanks.
Nigro said he believed there were 120 apartments in the building. “There’s a very large number of people right now who need a place to stay,” he said.
A city emergency management official said everyone who needed housing would be registered and would be placed in hotels for an “extended period” until it was safe to return to the building.