They have not yet found any of the firefighters believed to be buried under the rubble, Iran's fire chief told the official Islamic Republic of Iran News Network. More than 20 are thought to have died. Iranian firefighters start to dig a tunnel to make a corridor under the 17-storey Plasco building which collapsed after being engulfed by a fire, in central Tehran, Iran, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017. The huge size of the site makes reaching the trapped firefighters very difficult, the station said. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a statement Thursday supporting the firefighters' rescue efforts and giving his condolences to the families of the firemen who died. Hide Caption 13 of 13

"More than 20 of our colleagues in the fire department have lost their lives while trying to save the people in the fire," Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf was cited by IRINN as saying Thursday. Thirty-five firefighters are missing after the multi-story building collapsed around them as they battled a blaze, Tehran Fire Department spokesman Jalal Maleki told a local journalist on the scene. Tehran Fire Department spokesman Jalal Maleki said the cause of the building fire and collapse is being investigated. Hide Caption 4 of 13 Photos: Tehran building collapses following huge fire inside Authorities surround the debris of the collapsed building, which was one of Tehran's oldest high-rises. The disaster at the 17-story Plasco building, inadvertently shown live on state television that was reporting from the site after the building was engulfed in a fire on Thursday morning, came after authorities said they repeatedly warned tenants about blocking stairwells with fabric from cramped garment workshops on its upper floors. Official news agency IRNA cited Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi as saying Friday that all necessary measures had been taken to secure the German, Turkish and British embassies nearby. Located on Jomhouri Avenue in central Tehran, the Plasco building was constructed in 1962. It was named after a successful plastics business, Plascokar. Seventeen stories tall, it was the country's first private high-rise building and soon became a well-known feature of the city's skyline.
Search continues for missing firefighters in Tehran's Plasco Building site after the building's deadly fire and collapsing last day.