30 killed in fire at mental hospital

A fire ripped through a wooden mental hospital in Belarus today, killing 30 patients, the government said.

Officials said the fire may have been started by one of the patients.

Emergency workers initially pulled 29 bodies from the wreckage, and one person died later of burns, in the fire in the village of Randilovshchina, 150 miles west of the capital Minsk, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

One patient was missing, said Igor Zarembo, a duty officer at the ministry.

“He may have run away or he may have died. We haven’t found a body,” Zarembo said.

Some 31 patients received minor injuries and were sent to nearby psychiatric hospitals, he said.

No hospital staff were killed or injured in the blaze. A total of 62 patients were housed in the hospital.

Natalya Petkevich, a spokeswoman for President Alexander Lukashenko, said the fire was set by a patient who was known to be a pyromaniac and had tried to burn down the building on two previous occasions.

But Zarembo said that investigators were also considering a second possibility - that the fire resulted from careless handling of fire on the part of the staff. He said officials had ruled out the possibility of an electrical fire.

Emergency Situations Minister Valery Astapov told Belarusian television that hospital personnel tried to put the flames out themselves but failed. They only called firefighters half an hour later, he said.

He said that when firefighters arrived, the entire building was already in flames and the roof had caved in.

The fire occurred at 5am (0200 GMT), the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

The hospital was designated for people deemed unable to function whose relatives refused to take care of them.

Lukashenko ordered Prosecutor General Viktor Sheiman and the state secretary of the Belarusian Security Council, Gennady Nevyglas, to conduct a thorough investigation, Petkevich said.