Brazil museum fire: Funding cuts blamed as icon is gutted
Officials in Brazil have blamed lack of funding for a huge fire that has ravaged the country’s National Museum.
One of the largest anthropology and natural history collections in the Americas was almost totally destroyed in Sunday’s fire in Rio de Janeiro.
This included the 12,000-year-old remains of a woman known as “Luzia” – the oldest discovered in Latin America.
There had also been a string of complaints about the dilapidated state of the 200-year-old museum.
“We never had adequate support,” its deputy director said after the fire.
Experts had warned for years of a serious fire risk to the building