Over 70 Dead, 43 Injured As Fire Engulfs Building In South Africa's Johannesburg

Sixty three people were killed and 43 sustained injuries on Thursday after a fire broke out in the central business district of South Africa's Johannesburg.

As many as 73 people were killed and 43 sustained injuries on Thursday after a fire broke out in the central business district of South Africa's Johannesburg, the municipal government said, as reported by news agency Reuters. As per the officials, the fire ripped through a derelict apartment block occupied by homeless people. Earlier, the city administration took to X, formerly Twitter, and said that search and rescue efforts were on. "The City of Johannesburg Emergency Management Services can confirm that the number of fatalities has gone up to 63," it said.

According to photographs captured by Reuters, firefighters and emergency vehicles were at the scene, while bodies lay covered in emergency blankets on a street near the site of the blaze. According to the media, fire engulfed a five-storey building that was abandoned at one stage but where people had been living. The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.

Meanwhile, in another incident, a European Commission spokesperson said on Tuesday that the wildfire in Greece that has been blazing for days now is the largest wildfire ever recorded in the European Union (EU), reported news agency AFP.  According to the spokesperson, the bloc is mobilising nearly half its firefighting air wing to tackle the forest blaze.

For more than 10 days now, fire crews have been battling the flames in northeastern Greece which have killed at least 20 people and posed an "ecological disaster". Spokesman Balazs Ujvari said that the EU has sent eleven planes and one helicopter from its fleet to help Greece counter the fire, north of the city of Alexandroupoli, along with 407 firefighters, according to AFP.

The civil protection service of the EU said that the fire had burned more than 810 sq km – an area bigger than New York City. “This wildfire is the largest in the EU since 2000, when the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis) began recording data,” the service said.

Greece's fire service told AFP that the blaze was "still out of control" in the northeast region's Dadia National Park, a major sanctuary for birds of prey. Since its outbreak on August 19, the bodies of 20 people have been found, 18 of them migrants including two children that were discovered in a region often used as an entry point from neighbouring Turkey.

The EU currently calls on a fleet of 28 aircraft, comprising 24 water-dumping planes and four helicopters, supplied by member countries to help battle blazes in the bloc and in nearby neighbours.