Turkey’s military carried out airstrikes targeting Kurdish militants in northern Iraq on Sunday, just hours after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for a deadly bombing in the capital in the latest attack of its nearly four-decade long insurgency.

In a statement, the Turkish Defense Ministry said its warplanes destroyed 20 PKK targets including caves, bunkers, shelters and warehouses in the regions of Metina, Hakurk, Kandil, and Gara.

“Many terrorists were neutralized by using the maximum amount of domestic and national ammunition,” said the statement, which cited self-defense rights from Article 51 of the United Nations Charter to justify the strikes.

The PKK, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, earlier said it was behind the blast Sunday outside Turkey’s Interior Ministry building that left one dead and two injured, the pro-PKK Firat News Agency reported.

The ministry said in a statement that two attackers murdered a civilian and stole his vehicle ahead of the opening of parliament in Ankara. Two police officers reportedly received non-life-threatening injuries.

One assailant blew himself up and the other was “neutralized,” the ministry said.

Investigators found four different types of guns, three hand grenades, one rocket launcher, and C-4 explosives at the scene.

The ministry confirmed at least one of the two attackers is a PKK member. The second attacker has yet to be identified, it said.

Kurds, who do not have an official homeland or country, are the biggest minority in Turkey, making up between 15% and 20% of the population, according to Minority Rights Group International.

Portions of Kurdistan – a non-governmental region and one of the largest stateless nations in the world – are recognized by Iran, where the province of Kordestan lies; and Iraq, site of the northern autonomous region known as Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) or Iraqi Kurdistan.

According to Ankara, the PKK trains separatist fighters and launches attacks against Turkey from its bases in northern Iraq and Syria, where a PKK-affiliated Kurdish group controls large swaths of territory.

Terror attacks in Turkey were tragically common in the mid to late 2010s, when the insecurity from war-torn Syria crept north above the two countries’ shared border.

And in November last year, Ankara blamed the PKK for a bomb attack on a central pedestrian boulevard in Istanbul that killed six and injured dozens.

In recent years, Turkey has carried out a steady stream of operations against the PKK domestically as well as cross-border operations into Syria.

In an address to lawmakers Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that Turkey would continue its fight against terrorism “until the last terrorist is eliminated domestically and abroad.”

Sunday’s attack marked the “final flutters of terrorism” in the country, he added.

The United States may have avoided a government shutdown on Saturday – but the lack of additional funding for Ukraine in the spending bill has left some residents in the war-torn nation nervous.

Though US President Joe Biden lauded the deal reached by lawmakers, he also acknowledged the lack of new funding for Ukraine, vowing Washington “will not walk away” from Kyiv. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of leaders in the US Senate also promised to vote on more aid for Ukraine.

For some in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, the drama that has engulfed Congress for the past week is little more than noise as the war rages on.

“America’s strategic interests are so big that Ukraine is part of them,” he added. “And I think that the internal political struggle cannot affect the assistance to Ukraine that much. There will be some errors, but they will be insignificant.”

Kostiak said the fight over funding Ukraine is due to the political realities of the 2024 US presidential election, but he believes the possibility that Washington would stop helping Ukraine is slim.

“The US budget has been suspended 20 times in history, and never once has it led to any serious consequences,” the serviceman said. “So I don’t see this as a big problem for Ukraine.”

Natalia and Serhii Krasnoshchoks, an English teacher and an entrepreneur, were similarly optimistic.

“Yes, we have seen the news, but we think that there will be aid to Ukraine anyway,” they said. “We hope so very much. And of course, we will be grateful for any help. The more, the better.”

Others in the Ukrainian capital were less confident however – especially as American support wanes, nearly 20 months into the war.

It shows a shift in public enthusiasm, with a similar poll conducted in the early days of the invasion, in February 2022, finding that 62% of people surveyed felt the US should have been doing more.

Partisan divisions have widened since that poll, too, with most Democrats and Republicans now on opposing sides of questions on the US role in Ukraine.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor and senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, said Russian President Vladimir Putin would be closely watching the 2024 US presidential election as his invasion of Ukraine falters.

Putin is “hoping that by January 2025 that [former president Donald] Trump is back in there, and that will see a weakening of the resolve of the allies,” Sonnenfeld said.

But “there is no weakened resolve” in Congress, he added. “It’s just silly politics here that carve things up into pieces,” Sonnenfeld said.

‘Difficult consequences for everyone’

The US budget currently includes about $1.6 billion for the defense industry and $1.23 billion for direct budget support, as well as funds for humanitarian and energy projects, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

In a Facebook post, ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko said Kyiv is working with its partners in Washington to ensure that the budget Congress will work on over the next 45 days will include new funds to help Ukraine push back against Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who traveled to the Capitol last month to ask for more relief, has previously warned that a drop in US support could have severe consequences for the war effort.

“I understand that the US has its own political reality, it has common elections, and it has become part of the political process there,” she added. “I just want the US to remember that there is a human cost to all of that, and that all those delays … come at the cost of life.”

Back on the streets of Kyiv, logistician Tetiana Ostapchuk said Sunday she hadn’t heard much about the stopgap spending bill but added: “I can say for sure that we really need support from other countries, because we can’t do it alone.”

“Aid is very important. If it suddenly happens that America will no longer help us, then we will all fight to keep our land free. To the last man,” she said. “But it would still be easier with aid.”

Yulia Mueller, a chief accountant, also offered a grim prediction. “There may be a situation where the aid will stop, because a large percentage of Americans are unhappy that their money is being sent to Ukraine, that Ukraine is far away, that there is no threat to the US,” she said.

“On the other hand, it seems to me that all sane people who see the atrocities that have been and are happening here now – how entire cities are being wiped out – understand that this can spread to other countries as well,” she added.

“If America stops helping us, there will be very difficult consequences for everyone.”

The United States has condemned China’s reported sentencing of prominent Uyghur academic Rahile Dawut to life in prison, calling for the immediate release of the scholar known for documenting folklore and traditions of the Muslim minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

The statement, released by the US State Department Friday, follows a report from non-profit human rights group Dui Hua Foundation on September 21, which said Rahile Dawut was serving a life sentence for endangering state security, citing a source in the Chinese government.

Rahile Dawut, who is widely believed by academics and rights groups to have been taken into official custody in 2017, is among what the non-profit Uyghur Human Rights Project in 2021 estimated to be more than 300 Uyghur and other Muslim intellectuals detained by the Chinese government amid a broader crackdown.

The Chinese government has been accused of detaining more than a million Uyghur and other predominately Muslim individuals in internment camps in Xinjiang and conducting forceful assimilation to suppress their cultural and religious identity.

A report from the United Nations’ highest human rights office last year found China had committed “serious human rights violations,” which may amount to “crimes against humanity” in the region.

The report documented what it described as arbitrary and discriminatory detention within the context of the government’s “application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies.” It also cited “numerous reporting and data” on the arrest and imprisonment of “prominent scholars, artists and intellectuals from the Uyghur community.”

Academics and advocates say the oppression goes on, though it is being absorbed into the prison system and transformed into a forced labor apparatus and a culture of fear and surveillance.

China has fiercely denied committing rights violations and, after initially denying the camps existed, then said the facilities were “vocational education and training centers.” Last year, China told a visiting UN team the facilities had closed – a claim the UN office said it could not verify.

When asked about Rahile Dawut at a press briefing last month, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said she wasn’t aware of the situation, adding that “China is a country of rule of law.”

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in the statement Friday that Rahile Dawut and other Uyghur intellectuals “have been unjustly imprisoned for their work to protect and preserve Uyghur culture and traditions.”

“Professor Dawut’s life sentence is part of an apparent broader effort by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture and undermine academic freedom, including through the use of detentions and disappearances,” he said.

The State Department in 2021 said China had committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

A renowned scholar

Rahile Dawut is known as a foremost scholar of Uyghur culture, who focused her work on folklore and religious anthropology, including documenting Uyghur pilgrimage to religious shrines throughout Xinjiang.

Through her collaborations with international researchers, guest lecturing and teaching, she is credited by international academics with fostering a greater global understanding of Uyghur culture and making key contributions to preserving and documenting Uyghur heritage and architecture.

In 2007, Rahile Dawut founded a center focused on folklore at Xinjiang University, where she was a professor. She also received grants and awards from the Chinese government, according to the American Anthropological Association.

But in late 2017, she disappeared, according to academics and rights groups.

According to San Francisco-based Dui Hua, Rahile Dawut was tried in 2018 of for “splittism” or political separatism – a crime of endangering state security. She was convicted and appealed. That appeal was rejected by a Xinjiang high court, the organization said in its September 21 statement, citing the source.

In 2014, Xinjiang’s government pledged to eradicate extremism in the region amid government concerns about terrorism and separatism.

As well as detaining Uyghurs, Chinese authorities allegedly targeted Uyghur cultural and religious heritage that scholars like Rahile Dawut worked to study and preserve, according to rights groups, reports and academics.

The UN’s 2022 assessment cited reports detailing the “destruction of Islamic religious sites, such as mosques, shrines and cemeteries.” Those came alongside a larger policy in which “standard tenets of Islamic religion” were viewed as signs of extremism, and targeted by the government, it said.

The Chinese government last year said it “rightfully rejected” findings of the report, which it described in a formal response to the UN office as “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces.”

Since 2018, numerous rights groups have condemned Rahile Dawut’s alleged detention and called for her release, as well as that of other Uyghur intellectuals, including Ilham Tohti, an economics professor at Beijing’s Minzu University, who was handed a life sentence in 2014.

Rahile Dawut “is a brilliant teacher and researcher whose work has guided a generation of young scholars worldwide in deepening our knowledge of Uyghur culture,” the Open Society University Network (OSUN), an international academic organization that had earlier named her an honorary professor, said in a statement last month.

“The court’s sentence is an assault on academic freedom, the Uyghur people, and the rule of law. OSUN calls on the Chinese government to release Professor Dawut from prison and allow her to resume her important work immediately,” it read.

A church roof collapsed during Sunday mass in a northern Mexican city killing at least nine people and injuring 40, authorities said, as rescuers worked into the night, desperately looking for another 30 people believed to be trapped under the rubble.

Working under floodlights, military personnel supported emergency services using rescue dogs and earth moving equipment to identify and dig out survivors from the ruins of the church in Ciudad Madero, a city on the Gulf coast near the port of Tampico.

Footage on social media showed the moment the church roof caved in, puffs of gray smoke billowing into the air, followed by the toppling of yellow brick outer walls.

Nine people died and another 40 were taken to nearby hospitals, while 30 other worshippers remained unaccounted for, said Jorge Cuéllar, spokesman for the Security Ministry of Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas.

Speaking on Foro TV news channel, Cuéllar thanked local businessmen for bringing equipment to help remove rubble and aid rescue efforts.

Bishop Jose Armando Alvarez from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tampico said the church roof crumbled as worshipers were receiving communion and asked others to pray for the survivors.

“In this moment the necessary work is being carried out to pull out the people who are still under the rumble,” Bishop Armando said in a recorded message shared on social media.

This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines, which were crucial in curtailing the spread of Covid-19.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday.

It praised the scientists’ “groundbreaking findings,” which the committee said “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”

Karikó and Weissman published their results in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time, it said, but later laid the foundation for critically important developments that served humanity during the Covid pandemic.

“The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the committee added in a statement.

Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in medicine committee, said “mRNA vaccines together with other Covid-19 vaccines have been administered over 13 billion times. Together they have saved millions of lives, prevented severe Covid-19, reduced the overall disease burden and enabled societies to open up again.”

Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist, and Weissman, an American physician, are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work became the foundation for Pfizer and its German-based partner BioNTech, as well as Moderna, to use a new approach to produce vaccines that use messenger RNA or mRNA.

Messenger RNA is a single strand of the genetic code that cells can “read” and use to make a protein. In the case of this vaccine, the mRNA instructs cells in the body to make the particular piece of the virus’s spike protein. Then the immune system sees it, recognizes it as foreign and is prepared to attack when actual infection occurs.

This design was chosen for a pandemic vaccine because it’s one that lends itself to quick turnaround. All that is needed is the genetic sequence of the virus causing the pandemic. Vaccine makers don’t even need the virus itself – just the sequence.

“The impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed pave the way for using the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases,” the Nobel committee said, adding that the technology “may also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some cancer types.”

J. Larry Jameson, executive vice president of UPenn’s School of Medicine, praised the scientists’ work which “changed the world.”

“During the biggest public health crisis of our lifetimes, vaccine developers relied upon the discoveries by Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karikó, which saved innumerable lives and paved a path out of the pandemic,” Jameson said in a statement. “More than 15 years after their visionary laboratory partnership, Kati and Drew have made an everlasting imprint on medicine.”

The Nobel Prize announcements began in Sweden Monday and will continue throughout this week and into next, with awards in physics, chemistry, literature and economics set to be announced in the coming days. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Norway on Friday.

The road to the Nobel

Karikó, 68, began her career in her native Hungary in the 1970s, when mRNA research was new. She, her husband and young daughter left for the United States after she received an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia. They sold their car, Karikó told The Guardian, and stuffed the money – an equivalent of about $1,200 – in their daughter’s teddy bear for safekeeping.

“We had just moved into our new apartment, our daughter was 2 years old, everything was so good, we were happy,” Karikó told the Hungarian news site G7 of her family’s departure. “But we had to go.”

She continued her research at Temple, before joining the UPenn’s School of Medicine. But by then, the initial excitement surrounding mRNA research had started to fizz out. Hope turned to skepticism: Karikó’s idea that it could be used to fight disease was deemed too radical – and too financially risky to fund.

She applied to grant after grant, but a string of rejections meant that in 1995, she was demoted from her position at UPenn. She was also diagnosed with cancer at the same time.

But she stuck at it. “Together with my colleague, Drew Weissman, at the University of Pennsylvania, we developed this method where we changed one component in the RNA which made it less immunogenic. It is possible to use it for different kinds of therapies, Karikó said.

They did not even need a sample of the virus itself. “When the Chinese released the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we started the process of making RNA the next day. A couple weeks later, we were injecting animals with the vaccine,” he said.

At the time Karikó said she was not at all surprised by the successful results of the trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. “I expected that it would work, because we already had enough experiments,” she said.

Opposition candidate Mohamed Muizzu has won the Maldives presidential election, beating incumbent President Ibrahim Solih in a second-round runoff that could herald a pro-China shift for the Indian Ocean archipelago from traditional partner India.

With nearly all votes counted, the Elections Commission of the Maldives said on its website that Muizzu had received 54% of the ballots in Saturday’s vote, with 46% for Solih.

About 85% of 282,000 eligible voters in the Maldives, known for its pristine beaches and high-end resorts, turned up at more than 586 polling stations across 187 islands.

“I congratulate Muizzu for winning the election and thank the people for their exemplary democratic spirit,” Solih said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Solih, who championed an “India First” policy during his time in power, will remain as president until Muizzu’s inauguration on Nov. 17.

The coalition backing Muizzu has supported Chinese loans and investment projects in the past.

Former President Abdulla Yameen, who has close links to Muizzu, is serving an 11-year prison term for corruption and money laundering. Yameen’s supporters say the charges against him were politically motivated.

“Today the people made a strong decision to win back Maldives independence,” Muizzu told reporters in the capital, Male.

“All of us, working together with unity, Insha Allah, we will be successful.”

Muizzu also called on President Solih to release Yameen to house arrest.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a congratulatory message to Muizzu following the announcement of his victory.

“India remains committed to strengthening the time-tested India-Maldives bilateral relationship and enhancing our overall cooperation in the Indian Ocean Region,” Modi said on X.

The smell of burning wood and plastic hits us as we step out of the van. Smoke from campfires meets the cloud of dirt kicked up by our tires, stinging our eyes and leaving a scratch in our throats. In the near distance, you can hear children splashing and playing in the Suchiate River, which separates Mexico – where we are – from Guatemala.

We head toward the murky brown water, walking under tall, thick trees shielding us from the day’s brutal sun. We’re mindful of where we step, dodging scraps of cardboard used for beds and ducking under clothes hanging out to dry, careful not to intrude on someone’s personal space or modest belongings. It strangely feels more like a community rooted here for centuries, rather than a migrants’ campground.

And after the assault on the senses, comes the assault on the mind and the heart.

Stories abound from the people here, most originally from Venezuela, of why they left their homes and what they’ve gone through so far on their journeys to Ciudad Hidalgo. The adults sometimes become emotional but more shocking is the calm, matter-of-fact, narration from the children.

They had seen many dead people in the treacherous muddy jungle passage of the Darién Gap from Colombia to Panama, a group of young cousins tells me.

“I saw a woman, she had yellow hair and this part of her face was covered in blood,” says 9-year-old Mathias, gesturing to his right cheek.

I catch myself mid-interpretation from Spanish to English, realizing I am talking to children between the ages of 6 and 12 as they describe in vivid detail what they’ve experienced along the way.

“You get desperate in the jungle, you think you’re going to die in there,” Mathias says.

His 12-year-old cousin Sofia adds: “We ran out of food. We were starving for a night. … We all lost weight.” Her little brother Joandry lifts his shirt to show us his belly, as if to corroborate his sister and cousin’s accounts.

“It was hell,” Sofia says. “And every time you saw the end of the road, there was more to walk and we saw some dead people … lying on the ground.”

“It was hell,” 6-year-old Joandry corroborates again, looking at me with eyes that have seen far more than most adults.

Bonded by experience, where they’ve been and their hopes

The trauma from the trek they’ve endured already, mixed with the shared dreams of making it to the United States, bond many of the people on the banks of the Suchiate, especially the kids.

Sofia was the first to get our attention as she asks confidently and curiously what we’re doing here. We tell her we’re journalists. Her attention shifts to the water, and she excitedly points out to the river and one of the many rafts. “That’s my dad!” she tells us proudly. “He’s helping others come across.”

A few feet away, sitting on the ground and leaning up against a tree is Sofia’s mom, Susana. She’s holding her 2-year-old son as Sofia’s other younger siblings play close by. At first, Susana is more reserved – nodding for Sofia to answer our questions instead of her. But slowly she starts to open up, seemingly wanting to share their story.

Still in conversation with Sofia and Susana, I sit down on a concrete step under an open-air structure used for storing goods that are illegally moved across the river from Mexico to Guatemala. Sofia sits next to me as we look out to the armada of rafts going back and forth, with dozens more chained up and ready to deploy. They’re made of two large black inner tubes, tied together with rope and planks of wood across them to support goods and people.

Sofia’s dad, Jeandry, is one of the men who – like a gondolier on the canals of Venice – stands on the back with a long piece of wood steering the raft. At any given time, you can see across the river to Guatemala as up to a couple dozen migrants pile onboard and make the roughly 8-minute trip, illegally crossing into Mexico. Police are stationed a few hundred feet away, and the official crossing is within eyesight down river, but there’s no enforcement along the border just a near-constant free flow back and forth.

Sofia and her family say they took one of the rafts five days earlier. They’ve stayed on the riverbank instead of immediately continuing north to save up money, with Sofia’s dad working the rafts and the family asking for donations in the nearby town.

As I pull out a microphone, and my team starts recording with their cameras, Sofia’s siblings, aunt, uncle and cousins – who made the journey with them – crowd around. Little Joandry doesn’t want to miss out and hurries over with shampoo still in his hair, cackling as his older sister tries to clean it out.

“We’re thinking about Philadelphia [or] Chicago,” Sofia tells me, when I ask where in the US they’d like to go. Her 9-year-old cousin, Mathias, chimes in, “I’m thinking about New York or Florida.” Their parents look on, smiling as they’d told me moments earlier they had no idea where they’d end up; they just want to claim asylum and enter the US legally.

The kids smile too as they talk about their dreams to go to school. Sofia and Mathias want to be doctors, though Mathias might also want to be a lawyer, he tells me. When I ask what it’s been like traveling as a family, their faces turn expressionless for a moment. Solemn blank stares.

A difference in tone

The families have been on the road for nearly two months, having left Colombia, where they lived for the past six years.

“We had to leave,” Sofia says. “We couldn’t stay poor there because every day we ate the same thing. There were times when we couldn’t eat at all because there was no money.”

Before Colombia, the families fled Venezuela, to get away from the corruption and crime. “And a bad economy,” Joandry explains, taking the microphone out of my hand as if taking over the interview.

As we talk and film, my team and I recognize a subtle difference in the migrants’ tone here in southern Mexico compared with those who we’ve met on multiple trips to cities bordering the US hundreds of miles farther north.

For everything they’ve been through, those in the south have yet to experience the extortion and threats from cartel-backed smugglers or the treacherous rides on top of freight trains. Looking at the parents’ eyes, I can sense they have heard murmurs of what’s ahead. Loved ones and friends have gone ahead of them and warned of the horrors.

But they manage to strike a hopeful tone. “It’s better than what’s behind us,” Mathias’ mom tells us. “We don’t go backwards; we move forward with God’s blessings.”

As we thank the children and their parents for their time, Sofia and Mathias excitedly ask if we want to swim with them. “I have to stay dry to work,” I tell them. “OK!” they shout, sprinting toward the water like any other boisterous children, their trauma buried, for now. Each one echoes the other as we part: “Nos vemos! See ya later!”

Massive crowds descended on the Polish capital of Warsaw on Sunday for a rally organized by the country’s opposition party ahead of elections that could determine Poland’s future in Europe later this month.

Organizers said that 1 million people attended the “March of a Million Hearts,” though Polish press agency PAP quoted local police saying about 100,000 people participated.

Leaders of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) party are hoping to use Sunday’s gathering to build momentum ahead of the October 15 vote and regain political control from the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party that has ruled Poland since 2015.

Donald Tusk, the former European Council president now leading the PO, told crowds that the size of Sunday’s gathering showed that there was nothing that could stop the growing liberal political movement.

“This giant has awakened,” he said. “This change is inevitable, for the better.”

The upcoming election pits two parties with very different policy prescriptions for Poland’s future: the more nationalist, inward-looking, anti-immigration vision of the PiS versus the liberal, pro-Europe government being pitched by Tusk’s PO.

Tusk has alleged that the PiS is positioning Poland to leave the European Union, a charge which it denies.

But Poland’s conservative government has found itself repeatedly at odds with the EU in recent years.

That conflict reached fever pitch two years ago when Poland’s high court deemed EU rules were subordinate to Polish law, defying the primacy of EU law – a principle has bound together the union for decades.

The PiS has also shifted right culturally, hoping to woo conservative voters by promoting a nationalist Catholic image. That has seen the party take aim at LGBTQ groups. The country’s anti-abortion laws are the strictest in Europe.

Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski said that he hoped that Sunday’s event was the beginning of a march “toward a completely different Poland.”

“Millions have woken up,” Trzaskowski said. “We are moving full of courage and determination towards the future, towards a Poland that is tolerant, diverse, European and smiling.”

At least 13 people have been killed in Spain’s deadliest nightclub fire in decades, with fears the toll could rise further as emergency services search for more victims.

The cause of the blaze, which broke out early on Sunday at the Teatre venue in the southeastern city of Murcia, is not yet known.

Four others were injured: two women, aged 22 and 25, and two men, aged 41 and 45, who were all taken to the hospital due to smoke inhalation, the Murcia emergency services website said.

Survivors gathered outside the nightclub described the scene to journalists as emergency services carried out their work.

“I think we left (the club) 30 seconds – 1 minute before the alarms went off and all the lights went out the screams saying there was a fire. I was at place at that time where I could get out, but five family members and two friends are missing,” an unidentified survivor told Reuters.

“We don’t know anything, we are waiting for news to see whether some of our family members have come out alive,” said another man at the scene.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sent his condolences.

“My love and solidarity with the victims and families of the tragic fire that occurred this morning in a nightclub in Murcia. I have just conveyed to the president of the Murcia region all our support and collaboration,” Sanchez posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

At the time of the incident, emergency services were dispatched, with local firefighters calling in helicopter help to tackle the blaze.

“The General Director of Security and Emergencies, Ricardo Villalba, is on-site coordinating with the Murcia City Council the necessary means to manage this tragedy,” the emergency services said.

“The Vice President and Minister of the Interior, Emergencies and Territorial Planning, Jose Ángel Antelo, is expected to arrive at the site,” they added.

The fire in Murcia marks the deadliest nightclub fire in Spain in 33 years. A blaze in 1990 at a nightclub in northeastern Zaragoza left 43 dead.

In December 1983 81 people were killed in a nightclub blaze in Madrid, with smoke, a failure in the lighting system and a closed emergency door all contributing to the disaster.

Three days of mourning have been declared in the city of Murcia for “those who died in the fire that occurred at the Teatre de Atalayas nightclub”, Murcia mayor José Ballesta said on X.

An information area for relatives of the victims was set up in the nearby Palacio de los Deportes, where a team of psychologists will be tasked to provide assistance.

At least 10 Cuban migrants died and 17 others were injured when the truck they were traveling in overturned in southern Mexico on Sunday, Mexican authorities say.

The truck was “irregularly” transporting 27 Cuban nationals on the Pijijiapan-Tonalá highway in the southern state of Chiapas when the accident occurred, Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) said in a statement.

Officials said initial reports suggested the driver had been speeding and lost control of the unit, fleeing the scene after it overturned.

The 10 victims were female and included a minor, authorities said. All the injured are being treated in hospital.

“The INM will establish communication with the consular authorities to initiate the administrative process for the repatriation of the bodies to their country of origin and is aware of the evolution of the health status of those seriously injured,” the statement said.

Migrants from Central America and the Caribbean sometimes travel through Mexico in trucks and trailers in the hope of reaching the United States.

In 2021, 55 people were killed and more than 100 injured when a truck also believed to be carrying migrants overturned in Chiapas state, which borders Guatemala.