The "Pigeon 2006" exhibition was enjoying its busiest day Saturday, when some 200 people -- families, enthusiasts and exhibitors from across Europe -- packed the hall in the southern town of Chorzow.

Set to run from Friday to Sunday, the show ended tragically Saturday as the roof of the hall, heavy with packed snow, caved in, killing some visitors instantly and trapping others in a sub-zero prison of mangled metal bars.

A Dutchman who was among the exhibitors told AFP his father had died in the disaster.

"Before I was able to escape, I saw his body. I have also had confirmation from the consulate," Frederic Basch, in his 30s, said.

Basch and his father had travelled to Chorzow from Deil in the Netherlands, and had a stand at the show. They were among some 20 Dutch racing pigeon enthusiasts at the exhibition.

"Our Polish representative died with my father," Basch told AFP.

The show in Chorzow is the fourth most important in Europe, after exhibits in Dortmund and Kassel in Germany, and Blackpool in Britain.

The deputy police commander at the scene in Chorzow, Renata Kasprzyk, said nationals of Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were among the dead.

The consul general of the Czech Republic Josep Byrtus told AFP two Czechs had died in the disaster.

NPO, the Dutch organisation for pigeon-lovers, told AFP there were some 300,000 racing pigeon enthusiasts in 9,400 clubs across the European Union and Switzerland.

In France, the passion for pigeons is mostly found in the industrial north, while in Germany, pigeon-lovers are clustered largely in the coal and steel regions of the Ruhr and the Saar.

Poland counts some 43,000 enthusiasts, many of them miners from Silesia, the sprawling industrial region in southern Poland which is home to Chorzow.

"The Poles have some of the biggest groups of pigeon-lovers, after the Germans and the Belgians," Oscar Van Notten of Belgium, who travels from fair to fair to sell pigeon food, told AFP.

According to NPO, the ancient Greeks were the first to use pigeons to send messages, sure that the birds would come back home.

The passion for pigeons was embraced by Europe's nobility in the Middle Ages, and the first races for the birds were organised in Belgium in the early 19th century.

Enthusiasts race their pigeons over distances of up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), equipping the birds with metal rings and fitting their roosts with electronic devices which precisely measure the time it takes the pigeon to return to its point of departure.

"If a bird has a tailwind, it can cross France in one day," said Joseph de Scheemaeker, publisher of Belgian magazine "Pigeon rit" (Pigeon Laughs), who was attending the show in Chorzow.

When the roof of the exhibition hall collapsed, many of the show's visitors lost not only friends and family but also a small fortune.

"There were some beautiful, very expensive pigeons here. One was worth 300,000 zlotys (79,000 euros, 100,000 dollars)", lamented 41-year-old Jacek Wolowski, who, by a stroke of luck, had left the exhibition hall shortly before the disaster.

According to de Scheemaeker, the most valuable racing pigeon belonged to a labourer in Calais, northern France, who eventually sold it to a Japanese enthusiast for 200,000 euros.

Their wings frozen by plunging overnight temperatures, many pigeons were freed from the rubble on Sunday morning. Other pigeons escaped from the ruins and were caught in the bright lights of the rescue teams as they flew skyward.

"These doves, so beloved in Silesia, had been freed by the rescuers and were flying towards the heavens, taking with them the souls of the victims," Transport and Buildings Minister Jerzy Polaczek said.

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