"I met chaos and young people screaming in panic"

The town by Öresjö, a little over a mile north of Borås, with around 6,000 inhabitants, is perhaps best known for the company that manufactures work clothes.

It consists mostly of villas as in the block where the fire tragedy occurred at 7pm on Friday evening. Many of them with Halloween decorated with skeletons and pumpkins.

But in front of the double garage of one of the villas, the police put up cordon at ten o'clock on Saturday, waiting for forensic experts to start an investigation.

Anyone who otherwise just passed by on the quiet residential street could easily have missed that it was there that seven young people were injured so seriously that they are still being treated in hospital, one of them in the burn unit in Linköping with life-threatening injuries.

A tarpaulin has been set up for one garage door and under another is a pile of burnt rubble, including electric scooters.

Anna Karlander and her family live right next door. When DN meets her, she is still taken but still collected. She says she was watching Bamse on TV with her daughter when she first reacted.

- The neighbor has a teenage son, and he often has friends at home, they hang out there and ride scooters, make things and stuff, she says.

- But now it was very loud, I would really just go out and ask them to quiet down. But when I get out on the stairs, the way they scream... I understand that something has happened.

Anna Karlander hurried there.

- At first I didn't realize it was on fire, she says.

- But then a girl was sitting on the ground with her phone, I went up to her, she just gave me the phone, she had dialed 112. Then I understood that there was a fire in the garage.

At the same time, another neighbor arrived.

- It was just panic...

- I realized that someone was stuck in the garage, and that there was a fire there. The neighbor managed to open the gate and get a boy out. What I see is that it is burning heavily.

Anna Karlander says that there was talk of petrol catching fire.

- It was burning so much, so I think the boy who was still in there probably didn't manage to open it himself from the inside.

Anna Karlander works as an after-school teacher and has an eye on many of the young people in Fristad. She has had several of those who were in the garage in her children's groups.

- I wasn't prepared to face that, I was just going to ask them to calm down a bit. So you are met with this panic instead.

On Saturday morning we meet Morgan Andersson who is out with his dog Vera. He lives a couple of streets away and says he reacted to the large draw.

- All resources were in place. And it seems to have been much worse than I thought at the time. It can hardly be seen that it has burned like this afterwards. It's all very tragic. We can only cross our fingers.

Erik Åkerlund lives in the house opposite the garage that burned. He says he didn't react until the fire engine arrived.

- I noticed that Halloween was being celebrated in the street and there are a bunch of guys who usually hang out in the garage. But the only thing I saw for myself was that another neighbor had taken care of a guy sitting on the street.

Erik Åkerlund also saw when the emergency services pulled hoses into the garage.

- But then I didn't see any open flames.

Another neighbor, who helped one of the injured, says that all the young people were already out of the garage when he got there.

- I had a fire extinguisher with me, but it didn't help.

The guy he was taking care of and talking to was shocked.

- He hardly knew himself what had happened, says the neighbor.