At least 17 people died at a Caracas nightclub early on Saturday morning when a person activated a teargas grenade inside, Venezuela’s interior minister Néstor Reverol said.

Over 500 people were at a party at the Los Cotorros club in the El Paraiso neighbourhood when the device went off at about 3am during a fight between several people, causing a stampede towards the exits, Reverol said.

Eleven people suffocated to death when the gas filled the club’s confined space, said Noris Villanueva, an autopsy assistant at the local Perez Carreno hospital, who examined their bodies. It was not clear how the other six died.

Eight of those who died were under 18, Reverol said, and five people were injured.

Reverol said authorities had arrested seven people and the investigation was ongoing.

“The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, led by president Nicolas Maduro, deplores this unfortunate event. We send our condolences to the families,” he said.

The club, a two-storey building, was empty later on Saturday morning and there was no police presence outside, according to a Reuters reporter at the scene.

“We haven’t received a response from anybody, neither from the police nor the doctors,” Nilson Guerra, the father of one victim, said at the hospital.

He only knew his 19-year-old son Luis had died because he had seen him in the morgue. Another son of his had been hospitalised.