Between 20 and 25 people were injured in the accident in the southern German town of Bad Reichenhall on the Austrian border, a police spokesman said.

"The situation is catastrophic," a Bavarian Red Cross spokesman said, adding that the recovery operation was extremely difficult.

The dead included a young woman and a young man, police said. The child killed was about seven or eight years old.

The area around the rink was evacuated but rescue efforts were complicated by continued snowfall, following a blizzard that began overnight and reportedly dumped some 30 centimeters (12 inches) of snow.

The blizzard claimed the lives of at least two other people in the area Monday when an avalanche struck in the Reiter Alm range of the Alps near Bad Reichenhall. A third person was missing.

Ten people were reportedly caught in the sudden snow slide but seven were able to free themselves, police said. Two members of the group were later found dead, while rescue teams were still searching for the third.

The group spent New Year's Eve in a mountaintop cabin and was on a snowshoe expedition Monday when the avalanche struck.

Traffic was snarled throughout the Berchtesgadener region, where a state of emergency was declared, impeding the arrival of rescue teams.

The roof of the rink, built in the 1970s, caved in at about 1500 GMT. It was not immediately clear what had led to the collapse in a region accustomed to heavy snowfall each winter.

About 300 rescue workers including staff from the nearby Austrian city of Salzburg were on the scene. The fire brigade used cranes to lift remaining sections of the roof to allow better access in the search for victims.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.