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Swedes Mourn Teenage Fire Victims

Outside the gutted dance hall where 60 young people died in a raging fire, hundreds of people stood quietly on Saturday amid flowers and candles, attempting to come to grips with catastrophe.

In the parking lot that a day before had been a tumult of ambulances and screams, mourners laid a long pile of bouquets, candles and cards of remembrance.

The cards' inscriptions were brief "I will see you in heaven," "We miss you" and the people who stood reading them also had few words.

"I just wanted to show my sympathy. I think about them. There's nothing else we can do," said Caroline Ericsson, a resident who didn't know any of the victims.

For Lasse Gustavsson, having the right words wasn't as important as showing his face, which was severely disfigured in another fire. The former Goteborg firefighter lost his ears, his eyelids and most of his nose in a gas explosion.

By showing up, he said, he wanted to show the victims' relatives and friends that spirit can help them pull through despair.

"I can't give them hope. Consolation is enough," he said, as people nearby cast uneasy glances at his scars.

Many of the 162 people injured in the blaze may have to endure similar shocked looks the rest of their lives. Authorities say the explosive fire quickly raised the temperature in the overcrowded hall to 1,100 F.

The cause of the fire that broke out late Thursday remains under investigation. Witness accounts have varied widely, with some reporting smoke coming from the building's cellar and others saying the fire appeared to start in the ceiling of the dance hall on the building's second floor.

The fire's quick spread has prompted speculation that it could have been set, but officials also say the fire may have been burning undetected for some time.

What's known is that the building was packed far beyond its capacity. Licensed to hold a maximum of 150 people, the hall held at least 250 and perhaps as many as 400 when the fire hit.

The crowd was mostly teen-agers and mostly immigrants or children of immigrant parents. They had come for a disco dance organized by eight party-arrangers whom police have not identified; the hall was rented by the organizers from the local Macedonian immigrant association.

Officials said the dead and injured were of 19 nationalities, including Somalis, Ethiopians, Iraqis, Iranians and Swedes, as well as people from the current and former Yugoslavia and unspecified Latin American countries.

Identifying the dead was a painfully slow process, forcing relatives and friends already exhausted with dread to wait for hours at hospitals. Only 18 victims had been identified by midday Saturday.

"The identification is hard because they have no driver's licenses or other documents they were so young," said Kerstin Einarsson of Sahlgrenska Hospital, the largest in the city of 435,000 residents, about 300 miles wst of Stockholm.

By JAN M. OLSEN

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