"Fifteen people died of cold this weekend. The death toll this winter is therefore already at 214," more than the 190 who died of cold during the entire winter last year, Grazyna Puchalska, a spokeswoman for the national police, told AFP.

Eighty-seven of those who died were homeless people, Puchalska said.

Temperatures fell as low as minus 35 Celsius (minus 31 Fahrenheit) in parts of Poland last week. While they have become milder this week, temperatures are still below freezing at night in most of the country.

The weather is suspected as a cause of both the collapse of an exhibition centre in southern Poland on Saturday, and the deaths of many of the 62 victims as rescuers tried to reach them.

The snow-laden roof of the exhibition hall, built in 2000, caved in when it was packed with some 200 visitors to a racing pigeon show.

Those who did not die instantly when they were struck by metal bars and sheets of corrugated iron falling from the ceiling of the hall probably died of the biting cold at the weekend, when temperatures plunged to minus 17 Celsius (1.4 Fahrenheit), officials have said.

Meanwhile in Germany the toll in the cold spell gripping the country rose to 10 on Monday as police said two more people had been found frozen to death.

They said the body of a homeless man was found lying in a field in the northen port city of Hamburg where the temperature dropped to minus 13 degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) overnight.

Another man, aged 42, was found dead in freezing temperatures in Karlstadt in southern Germany.

Five more people died from the freezing weather which has gripped Romania for the last 10 days - bringing the total to 60, of whom 18 have been homeless - a statement from the Romanian ministry of health said on Monday.

Two people died of hypothermia and a third from severe frostbite suffered the previous weekend in the northern district of Bistrita.

Two others died in the district of Timis, in the west of the country, and in Vaslui, in the north-east, the communique added.

An earlier communique on Saturday put the death toll as a result of the cold snap at 55.

The cold weather, which hit Russia first, spread westwards across Europe as far as Portugal.

Even Lisbon was hit, experiencing its first heavy snowfall in 52 years, and icy conditions forced the closure of many motorways and main roads in the north and centre of the country on Monday, a traffic police official said.

In southern France conditions eased, but traffic was still restricted on roads into Andorra because of avalanche fears, and some 20,000 households remained without electricity because snow had brought down power lines.

In the Aude department local authorities said a number of villages were threatened with a repeat of flooding which claimed 34 lives in 1999.

Residents were warned to move to an upper floor of their houses or leave their homes altogether as three days of rain had swollen the Aude river to a dangerous level.

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