Belarus mental hospital fire kills 30 patients

A FIRE believed to have been set by a psychiatric patient engulfed a Belarusian mental hospital, killing 30 patients and reducing much of the century-old wooden building to ash.

One of the 62 patients who lived at the hospital in the village of Randilovshchina, some 150 miles west of the capital, Minsk, was missing.

Emergency officials said yesterday they did not know whether he ran away or died in the blaze.

Another 31 patients had minor injuries, officials said.

No hospital staff were in the building when the fire started.

A spokeswoman for President Alexander Lukashenko, Natalya Petkevich, said the fire was set by a patient who had tried to burn down the building twice before. The patient was among those killed.

But Igor Zarembo, a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry, said investigators were also considering a second possibility that the fire resulted from carelessness on the part of the staff.

A nurse and an orderly were sleeping in a separate building on hospital grounds when the fire broke out, Mr Zarembo said.

When they awoke to screams and the smell of smoke, they apparently panicked and tried to put out the fire and rescue patients themselves, instead of immediately calling for help.

"As a result of such poorly thought-out actions, by the time emergency personnel arrived, one of the hospital's wings was completely engulfed in flames and the roof and ceiling had collapsed," Emergency Situations Minister Valery Astapov told Belarusian television.