SAO PAULO, Jan 19: Nine people were killed and 93 injured after a roof of a large church in Brazil’s largest city of Sao Paulo collapsed during a Sunday service, national media reported on Monday.

The disaster happened in the evangelical Reborn in Christ Christian Church, in the southern suburb of Cambuci around 7:00 pm on Sunday, while the building was occupied by up to 400 worshipers.

The church was known in Brazil and abroad as the venue where Kaka — the Brazilian soccer star who is currently being wooed to move to Manchester City from AC Milan — married in December 2005.

Newspaper and television images taken from helicopters showed the inside of the church to be a jumbled mass of rubble and bent steel girders.

From the street, the destruction was not immediately apparent because the walls of the white building remained intact, and rescue workers had erected cloth barriers to prevent crowds of curious bystanders from looking in.

The toll was higher than that given by officials overnight because of the discovery of another body in the debris, and the death in hospital of a 62-year-old man who had been critically hurt, the website of news group Globo reported.

Most of those killed were women.

It was not immediately possible to confirm the toll with the military police-run fire service.

Witnesses told media of panic as the roof started to cave in.

“There was a huge noise and then people started running everywhere. I saw a lot of people hurt, a lot of panic, screams and chaos ... then there were various efforts to save the people trapped under the rubble,” one man who survived was quoted as saying.

“I heard a rumbling, like a storm, and then the entire roof fell in,” Felipe Guimaraes, 17, told O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper.

The reason for the collapse was not immediately known. The church recently underwent superficial renovation work, and in recent days Sao Paulo has been hit by heavy rains. The building previously housed a cinema.

The Reborn in Christ denomination has a significant following in Brazil, where it was started in 1986, as well as in Argentina, Uruguay, the United States and Japan.

It possesses around 1,500 churches and relies on donations from followers.

Its founders, Estevao and Sonia Hernandes, have built an extensive media empire. They have also come under suspicion from authorities of using the church for money laundering, and were arrested in Miami in 2007 for money smuggling.—AFP