Dramatic images of people trying to escape the flames at a hospital in Beijing

Twelve people have been detained as of this stage as part of the ongoing investigation into the previous fire in a hospital in Beijing, which had an effect 29 people lost their livesaccording to the latest tally of victims announced by the authorities, which means it was the deadliest since 2002 in the Chinese capital.

Around the health facility, heavy police forces – including plainclothes officers – discouraged passers-by from observing or filming the scene of the disaster, AFP journalists found.

The building’s main entrance appeared intact from the outside, but images of the interior, posted on the Caixin news website, which mainly deals with financial issues, showed charred beds and walls blackened by the flames.

On one of the facades of the hospital building complex, windows and walls with visible smoke marks and at least one broken window can be seen.

“I don’t have a relative who is hospitalized or affected by the fire, I just came to see the situation,” said a 50-year-old resident of the capital, who did not want to be named.

“I think this is the worst hospital tragedy in the history of Beijing. I wonder what could have caused the fire”, said another citizen, also in his fifties. “It is a hospital with a rather good reputation,” he emphasized.

The authorities were notified of the fire at Changfeng Hospital, in the Fengtai district, yesterday shortly before 13:00 (local time; at 08:00 Greek time), according to international agencies and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

The flames were extinguished half an hour later and rescue crews removed 71 patients over the next two hours, according to the official Beijing Daily newspaper.

The latest death toll, which is 29, was released by Li Zhongrong, vice mayor of Fengtai suburb, where the hospital is located. The deputy mayor expressed his “sincere condolences” to the relatives of the victims.

The previous official count was 21 dead.

According to Mr Li, 26 of the dead were patients. The fire broke out in a ward where patients in a serious or critical condition were being treated, he explained.

Twelve people were arrested in the investigation, including the hospital’s director and employees of a company that had undertaken renovation work on it, according to Sun Haitao, an official with Beijing’s security services.

Until yesterday, the deadliest fire in the Chinese capital was the one that occurred in June 2002 in an internet cafe, which killed 25 students.

Dramatic images of people trying to escape the flames by climbing air-conditioning units abroad, or hanging from bed sheets before jumping into the air, have circulated on Chinese social media sites, but some posts on the subject have been deleted, particularly comments criticizing the delay in informing citizens about the tragedy.

One of them, according to the Reuters news agency, criticized the hospital administration for boasting about the readiness of the health structure to face fires as recently as February, in a post on the WeChat platform; another that “while the work of the rescue crews was completed in 3.5 hours, the world learned that 21 people died when it was already past eight in the evening”; a third that “it is very strange that we learned so little about a fire which claimed the lives of so many people in such a large city like Beijing”.

Yin Li, the secretary of the local Communist Party organization in Beijing, who went to the scene, called it “priority number one” to offer “care to the wounded,” according to the Beijing Daily.

Families of patients said they had no news of or contact with their relatives, many of whom are elderly with mobility problems, the Chinese Youth Daily, another official newspaper, reported.

Fatal fires are common in China, due to inadequacies in fire safety regulations and the corruption of enforcement officials. However, in comparison, they are much rarer in Beijing.

In November 2022, ten people died when it erupted fire in a block of flats in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (northwest), sparking anger against the restrictive measures to deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic, as they were judged to have hindered the work of rescue crews.

Also in November, 38 people died in a factory fire in Anyang (central), which authorities blamed on a worker mishandling a machine.

Source: News Beast

You may also like