A hospital director in China has been arrested after a fire at his facility in Beijing killed 29 people in one of the capital’s worst disasters in more than two decades, authorities announced Wednesday.
Images posted on social media of Tuesday’s fire showed patients hanging from sheets, escaping through windows and taking shelter by sitting on facade air conditioners and were quickly censored.
The statement was made by Li Chongrong, vice mayor of Fengtai District, where the hospital is located, and he expressed his “sincere condolences” at a press conference.
“We feel deep regret, we feel guilty,” he told reporters, and “we apologize to the entire city”.
The victims included 16 women and 13 men.
12 arrests
The city police, on its part, announced the arrest of 12 people, including the director of the hospital and company employees who were involved in renovation work in the building.
According to an initial investigation cited by state television’s CCTV, the fire was caused by “sparks during internal renovation work”.
The sparks “ignited flammable paint volatiles on the floor,” according to the investigation.
On Wednesday morning, there was a heavy police presence around the establishment, trying to discourage groups of passers-by looking at their phones and taking pictures, AFP journalists noted.
Charred beds and charred walls
The building’s main entrance appeared largely intact from the outside, but pictures of the interior released by business media Caixin showed completely charred beds and blackened walls.
On a facade of the hospital complex, windows and walls can be seen brown, as well as a broken window.
The alarm of the fire at Changfeng Hospital was given shortly before 1:00 p.m. (07:00 Swiss morning) on Tuesday, and the disaster was extinguished half an hour later, according to local media.
Of the 29 victims, 26 were patients, two were hospital staff and one was a patient’s relative, according to CCTV.
As for the 78 patients still in the institution, according to the same source, they have been shifted to the west side.
Municipal officials said 39 people injured in the fire were admitted to hospital on Wednesday morning.
Online audit
The fire was the most intense in the Chinese capital in more than two decades. In June 2002, a fire at an Internet cafe killed 25 students.
Pictures of people seeking safety from the fire in air conditioners installed in front of hospitals, or clinging to sheets before jumping from buildings, have been shared on social media.
“The first priority is to treat the injured,” said Yin Li, secretary of the Communist Party in Beijing, who visited the scene, the Beijing Daily reported.
Many patients’ families say they have lost contact with loved ones, and the missing patients are often elderly people struggling to get around, the official China Youth Daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Changfeng Hospital is located in western Beijing, a 25-minute drive from Tiananmen Square.
On Chinese social network Weibo, internet users complained on Wednesday that online censorship was quickly deployed around the drama.
precedents
“Many people died. It’s a major security incident and it’s weirdly not as popular as one celebrity insulting another,” one person noted.
“They do a good job of removing (this information) from the most searched terms” on the social network, joked another.
Fire accidents are very common in China due to poor safety standards and the corruption of the authorities responsible for enforcing them. But they are very rare in Beijing.
In November 2022, a fire in a residential building in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang (northwest), killed 10 people, sparking a movement of popular anger against anti-Covid health restrictions that were blamed for hampering emergency work. Services.
In November, 38 people died in a factory fire in Anyang (Central), which authorities blamed on mistreatment of workers.
This article was published automatically. Sources: ats / afp
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