37 killed in fire at Kazakh drug rehab clinic

A fire at a drug treatment centre in Kazakhstan with a history of safety violations killed 37 people as patients tried to escape through barred windows, officials said today.

The blaze broke out at about 12.30am and quickly spread through the single-storey Soviet-era building. About 40 people were evacuated from the building, emergency officials said.

“I heard them screaming for 20 minutes. They were screaming ’Save us, save us’,” one woman who lives across the road from the centre said.

The cause of the fire about 120 miles north of Almaty, the country’s largest city, was not immediately known. Locked doors on wards and bars on the windows blocked some potential escape routes, emergency situations minister Vladimir Bozhko said.

He said inspectors had found a number of violations in the 7,000sq ft building during a visit in May and that the building had no alarm system. Some of the violations had been fixed, but work on installing an alarm system had not yet begun.

Prime minister Karim Masimov has demanded the creation of a commission to investigate the incident, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

Violations of safety regulations are common in much of the former Soviet Union and fatal fires are frequent. A fire at a drug treatment facility in Moscow in 2006 killed 45 women.

There have been almost 10,000 fires in Kazakhstan in the first eight months of 2009, according to government statistics.