Sunog sa Sinehang Nagpalabas ng "Bituing Walang Ningning" (New York Times, 1985)

 

44 FILIPINOS KILLED IN THEATER BLAZE
AP. New York Times [New York, N.Y] 22 Apr 1985: A.4.

A rural audience fled in panic from a fire in a movie house complex in the southern Philippines today, and 44 people, most of them teen-agers, were killed, the police said.

Fifty-three people were injured.

"Somebody shouted fire and all of a sudden there was confusion - people started rushing to the doors," said Jeanette Barja, 13 years old, who was one of 20 people injured seriously enough to be hospitalized. She spoke in a telephone interview from a hospital in Tabaco, 200 miles southeast of Manila.

 The police said 33 other people received injuries but did not require hospital care.

The theater complex is on the second floor of a three-story building in the center of Tabaco. An inn, a restaurant and a department store are also in the building.

Miss Barja was among fans, including mothers carrying babies, who packed the Cine Aracade's Cinema I to watch a movie titled "Star Without a Glow." The movie featured Sharon Cuneta, a favorite movie star.

Policemen said the fire was actually in the adjacent Cinema II, which was showing two foreign-language films. That theater was almost deserted. Two charred bodies were found there, indicating the rest of the deaths occurred as people fled, the police said.

The police said most of the victims were teen-agers and the official Philippine News Agency said those killed included six children aged 3 to 9.

"The people panicked and were screaming and running," the Tabaco police chief, Lieut. Col. Maximo Hebrio, said in a telephone interview. "Many fell down the stairs and other were trampled to death at the doorways."

Colonel Hebrio said the fire was a "small one" that burned only part of the theater.

The town is in the Bicol region of Luzon Island where Communist guerrillas are active. The Government has blamed rebels for eight recent hotel fires that killed about 60 people in Manila and the northern city of Baguio.

The rebels denied responsibility for the fires, and Colonel Hebrio said today that he did not think the movie house fire was caused by guerrillas.

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 22, 1985

(Picture not originally included in the article.)