Grenfell Tower on fire

More than 50 are in hospital after a huge fire raged through the night at a west London tower block, a fire chief says. Eyewitnesses described people trapped in the burning Grenfell Tower, in north Kensington, screaming for help and yelling for their children to be saved.

Firefighters rescued "large numbers", but London Mayor Sadiq Khan said "a lot" of people were unaccounted for. The BBC’s Andy Moore said the whole 24-storey block had been alight and there were fears the building might collapse. London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton said there had been “a number of fatalities” but she could not say how many because of the “size and complexity” of the building.

Paul Munakr, who lives on the seventh floor, managed to escape. “As I was going down the stairs, there were firefighters, truly amazing firefighters that were actually going upstairs, to the fire, trying to get as many people out the building as possible,” he told the BBC. He said he was alerted to the fire not by fire alarms but by people on the street below, shouting “don’t jump, don’t jump”. “Now, honestly I don’t know for certain if people jumped off the building to get away from the fire, but the main thing for me with this incident is the fact that the fire alarms didn’t go off in the building,” he said.