10:13

Firefighters battled for a second day to extinguish a blaze at a high-rise apartment complex in Hong Kong on Thursday, as the death toll rose to 94 in one of the deadliest blazes in the city’s modern history.

Axar.az informs, citing AP, rescuers holding flashlights were going from apartment to apartment at the charred towers as thick smoke poured out from some windows at the Wang Fuk Court complex, a dense cluster of buildings housing thousands of people in Tai Po district, a northern suburb near Hong Kong’s border with the mainland.

Officials said firefighters were still working on a handful of apartments and trying to enter all of the units in the seven towers to ensure there were no further casualties.

“Our firefighting operation is almost complete,” said Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of Fire Services Operations. Firefighters were working hard “to prevent the debris and embers from flaring up. What’s next is the search and rescue operation,” he added.

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The death toll from Hong Kong’s worst fire in nearly 80 years has risen to 128 and about 200 people remain missing from the high-rise residential complex that was engulfed by the blaze, the city’s security chief said on Friday, according to Reuters.