Authorities vow impartial inquiry into Mexico day-care center fire

The death toll from a fire at a day-care center rose to 44 on Monday, as authorities promised their investigation would be unaffected by family ties between a co-owner and the wife of President Felipe Calderon.

Officials in the northern border state of Sonora said three more children had died as a result of Friday’s fast-moving blaze, during which rescuers found only one working door.

The episode has raised questions about official oversight of the preschool, known as ABC. The facility, a converted warehouse, was run privately but under authority of the Social Security Institute, which operates more than 1,500 day-care centers around Mexico for 223,000 children.

State and federal officials said Monday that they would investigate fully, regardless of the owners’ family and political ties. Those links were a growing source of controversy after it emerged that one of the owners, Marcia Gomez del Campo Tonella, is related to First Lady Margarita Zavala, and that Gomez del Campo’s husband is a top public-works official in the Sonoran government. The husband of a second owner is also a ranking Sonoran official.

The newspaper El Universal identified Gomez del Campo as a second cousin of the first lady.

“We have absolutely nothing to hide and nobody to protect,” Sonora Gov. Eduardo Bours said. Bours and Calderon are from rival political parties.

Bours dismissed as irrelevant the co-owner’s relationship to the first family, noting that the day-care center was licensed in 2001 -- five years before Calderon was elected. He said the two husbands took their state posts two years after the preschool had opened.

“There is no relationship between one thing and the other,” Bours said during a radio interview with journalist Carmen Aristegui.

Daniel Karam, who directs the Social Security Institute, has said the center underwent a municipal safety inspection on May 26 and was found to have emergency exits, an evacuation route and fire extinguishers.

But desperate parents and rescuers had to punch holes in the walls -- one used his pickup as a battering ram -- to open an escape route for the children. The state prosecutor, Abel Murrieta, said that an oversized, garage-type door in front had been sealed shut from inside.

“There [was] only one small door working,” he said during a news conference. Murrieta said two other exits were hard to spot and had been locked.

The center sits in an industrial zone and shares a wall with a warehouse used by the state’s treasury department. Murrieta said there was “no doubt” the blaze began there, though it was not clear how.

Officials said 123 children were inside at the time, along with 30 adults. More than 30 children remained in hospitals Monday.

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ken.ellingwood@latimes.com