Mecca, Saudi Arabia - At least 20 Muslim pilgrims were killed in the Saudi holy city of Mecca when an aging hostel collapsed in the latest tragedy to hit the annual hajj, officials said.
A further 59 people were injured, the officials said, adding that the casualty toll could rise as emergency teams fought their way through the rubble of the multi-storey building using earthmovers and heavy lifting equipment.
Interior ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki said that floodlights had been installed to allow the search for survivors to continue through the night.
The dead consisted of eight women and 11 men, as well as one body which had been so badly deformed by the building's collapse that its gender had yet to be determined.
The spokesman gave no breakdown of the nationalities of the dead, but survivors said most of the pilgrims staying in the hostel came from India, Libya, Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates.
Speaking during an inspection tour of the scene of the tragedy just 200 metres (yards) from the Great Mosque -- Islam's holiest shrine -- deputy governor Dawoud al-Fayez said it was still too early to give a definitive toll.
"Give us a chance. We are still looking for survivors," he told reporters.
Emergency teams armed with sound-detecting gear had been working frantically through the day to try to locate survivors amid the rubble.
An AFP correspondent saw medics pulling out one bloodied survivor with a respirator over his face while a huge yellow crane lifted off slabs of concrete threatening to entomb other people.
A dead woman was later pulled from under the rubble with her body covered in a white sheet.
Anguished survivors pleaded with the emergency services to rescue missing loved ones trapped beneath the hostel, which toppled like a house of cards.
"My two brothers are inside," Tunisian pilgrim Aiysha bin Jaber, 66, begged the security personnel pushing her back from the tight cordon set up around the collapsed building.
Jalal Abdelrahim, a Bangladeshi porter at the neighbouring Al-Zaydi hotel, said six of his Bengali friends who worked in shops at the bottom of the collapsed building were still missing.
Witnesses spoke of their horror at the speed with which the block collapsed after a fire.
"It looked like a scene from September 11," said Talhah al-Mazi, 40, referring to the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
"I saw people rushing out, crying and screaming for help," he told AFP, adding that the cave-in happened just as pilgrims were finishing midday prayers in the square outside.
French pilgrim Abderrahmane Ghoul said a firefighting helicopter was already tackling the initial blaze when the tower collapsed.
The tragedy came despite a massive deployment of security and civil defence personnel in a bid to prevent any repetitions of the deadly stampedes and structural failures that have marred previous pilgrimages.
Stampedes killed 251 people in 2003 and 1,426 in 1990
Regional civil defence director General Adel Zamzami charged that the Luluat Al-Kheir (Pearl of Grace) hostel had been overcrowded at the time of its collapse.
"Through our inspection of the site ... there was a clear indication that the building was overloaded," he said.
Despite the tragedy, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims carried on with the rituals of their faith, flocking to the nearby Great Mosque for sunset prayers just hours after the collapse.
Surveyors were checking the structural safety of adjacent buildings and had already ordered two evacuated, Zamzami said.
He described the tragedy as "a small incident and not a disaster," insisting it was "Allah's will and this might happen any time".
There was no immediate word on what might have started the fire.
In previous years, camp fires have sparked infernos in pilgrim encampments but the kingdom has also been battling deadly unrest blamed on Al-Qaeda sympathizers since 2003.
The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and Muslims are required to make it at least once in their lifetime if they have the means to do so.