Russian hospital fire kills 45 trapped women

A fire has broken out in a women’s ward of a Moscow drug treatment hospital, filling the ward with heavy smoke and killing 45 women who became trapped between the fire and a locked gate, officials said.

It is the deadliest fire in the Russian capital in three years.

Russia’s chief fire inspector, Yuri Nenashev, said he was “90% certain” that the fire was caused by arson. But Moscow city prosecutor Yuri Syomin said that investigators were looking into other possibilities, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The fire erupted in a wooden cabinet in a kitchen at one end of a corridor on the hospital’s second floor – a factor that led to suspicions of arson – and the only other exit, at the other end, was blocked by a locked gate, Mr Nenashev said. The barred windows were shut with locks that hospital staff could not open.

All 45 women were already dead by the time firefighters arrived, said Alexander Chupriyanov, the deputy emergency situations minister.

“Judging by the placement of the bodies, they really tried to get out,” he said.

Moscow fire department spokesman Yevgeny Bobylyov said that investigators were still working at the site of Hospital No. 17 in southern Moscow but that it was already clear that the first call to the fire department late last night had come too late.

“Secondly, the hospital personnel worked very badly. They did not take steps to evacuate people in the early stages of the fire,” he said.

One hundred and sixty people were evacuated from the five-story building, and 10 people were hospitalised with carbon monoxide poisoning, Mr Bobylyov said. Firefighters put out the fire within an hour of the first call for help, he said.

Most victims died of asphyxiation, Mr Bobylyov added. Some died of burns, according to ITAR-Tass. News agencies reported that two hospital staff members were among the dead.

ITAR-Tass said that the area of the fire was comparatively small, some 100 square meters, but that the heavy concentration of smoke killed people. Ekho Moskvy radio said that burning plastic wall coverings had worsened the heavy, toxic smoke.

A few ambulances were lined up outside the hospital, situated in a residential neighbourhood in southern Moscow. Reporters were kept well away from the building, set deep in a courtyard, but no obvious signs of fire or smoke damage were visible on the façade.

A van from the city’s psychological health service pulled up outside the hospital and a few people went inside, presumably to provide counselling for relatives of the victims. The relatives were brought into the staff entrance to the hospital, well away from reporters.

Mr Nenashev said that fire inspectors had visited the hospital twice, in February and March, and that they had recommended the temporary closure of the facility after the second visit because of fire safety violations.

Russia record about 18,000 fire deaths a year – roughly 10 times the rate in the US and 12.5 times higher than in Britain. Experts say fire fatalities have skyrocketed since the end of the Soviet Union, in part because of lower public vigilance and a disregard for safety standards.

It was the worst fire to break out in Moscow in three years. In November 2003, a pre-dawn fire swept though a dormitory for foreign students there, who had been quarantined for medical checks, killing 36 and injuring nearly 200. Many were trapped behind permanently locked exits, causing some to leap from the five-storey building.

A January fire in Moscow’s main oncological hospital caused the evacuation of hundreds of patients but did not result in deaths or injuries. An October 2005 fire at a home for the mentally ill outside the capital killed seven patients and a fire in a Moscow city hospital the following month killed four.

A fire in a school for the deaf in the southern region of Dagestan killed 28 children in April 2003, in the same week as 22 students burned to death in a wooden schoolhouse in Siberia.