Fires in two Swiss cities leave 19 injured, five people remain missing

Two fires reported last night in Schaffhausen and Tüssiz, Switzerland, left 19 people injured, while authorities continued searching for five people who remained missing, local police said.

In Tüssiz, in the canton of Grisons, flames engulfed a building housing a restaurant and apartments. According to police, the building was completely destroyed by the fire.

Five people have still not been found, while 14 others managed to escape the building. Among those evacuated were eight injured people: two in serious condition, two with moderate injuries and two with minor injuries.

After receiving first aid at the scene, the injured were transported to three hospitals in the area, as well as hospitals in Zurich.

Authorities have launched an investigation to determine the cause of the fire, which is suspected to have started on the building’s second floor.

Police said the building’s stairways collapsed and that the roof had to be opened with the help of a crane.

Around 100 firefighters were deployed to extinguish the flames, while the operation continued into the morning. A photograph released by police shows a multi-storey residential building engulfed in flames, with fire emerging from the windows of an upper floor and a dense cloud of smoke above it.

A second fire broke out on Thursday evening, at around 10:30 p.m., in the kitchen of an apartment building in Schaffhausen, a city near the border with Germany.

Eleven people were injured in the incident, nine of whom were taken to hospital. Local police confirmed that a police officer was among those injured.

When emergency teams arrived, the apartment was already ablaze. The firefighters’ intervention prevented the fire from spreading to the other apartments.

Police also said that the exact causes of this incident remain under investigation.