Baku (March 03, 2018): At least 25 people perished in a fire which tore through a drug rehabilitation clinic in the Azerbaijani capital Baku early Friday, with activists saying safety standards had not been met.
Video footage broadcast on local television showed huge flames leaping through barred windows of a one-storey wooden hospital ward.
It took some three hours for 10 squads of firefighters and rescuers from the emergencies ministry to extinguish the blaze.
President Ilham Aliyev, who went to the scene, has set up a governmental commission to probe the cause of the blaze and ordered financial aid to be allocated for the families of the victims, his office said.
“At 06:10 am a fire broke out at the Republican Narcological Centre in Baku,” the General Prosecutor’s Office, the health, interior and emergencies ministries said in a joint statement.
“According to the latest data, 25 people died in the fire,” said the updated statement, which initially put the death toll at 24.
Four more people were hospitalised with serious burns, the statement said, citing a power grid defect as the initial cause of the blaze.
More than 200 patients and medical staff were evacuated unharmed, the statement added.
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