Beijing hospital fire: Death toll rises to 29

Beijing [China], April 19 (ANI): 29 people were killed in a fire that hit Changfeng Hospital in the Fengtai district of the Chinese Capital Beijing on Tuesday, but very few details were revealed as the authorities kept a tight lid on it, CNN reported.

In Wednesday’s short news conference, officials revealed details of those who died. Among them were 26 inpatients with an average age of 71. The oldest victim was 88. A nurse, a care worker and a family also died in the fire, according to Li Zongrong, deputy head of the Fengtai district government.
A total of 142 people were evacuated, including 71 patients. As of Wednesday, 39 injured remained in hospital, with three in critical condition, said Li Ang, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission.

As flames tore through the Changfeng Hospital in Fengtai district from early afternoon Tuesday, the patients were forced to desperately clamber out of windows and huddle on air conditioning units, state media kept silent and censors appeared to scrub the internet of any mentions.

The extent of information control and censorship came as a shock to internet users, as well as Beijing residents, many of whom complained online that they had no idea a deadly fire had erupted in their city until late on Tuesday night, CNN reported.

According to Zhao Yang, an official at Beijing’s fire department, “The blaze that engulfed an inpatient building of Changfeng Hospital was caused by sparks from interior renovation work that ignited flammable paint.”

Twelve people were detained on suspicion of gross negligence, including the hospital's director and construction workers, said Sun Haitao, an official with the Beijing Public Security Bureau.

In videos shared on social media Tuesday, smoke billowed out of several hospital windows as people desperately attempted to escape the blaze. At least one person appeared to use a rope made from bedsheets to descend from a window onto a lower-level terrace, CNN described the viral videos.

Others were either seen huddling on air conditioning units positioned on the exterior of the building or trying to use the units to manoeuvre themselves from one level to the next. One person was seen jumping from one level of the building to the lower terrace.

The blaze is the most deadly in Beijing in recent years, surpassing the toll from a fire in 2017 that killed 19 in a cramped two-story building in the Daxing district in the capital's southern suburb, CNN reported.

It's also one of the most heavily censored incidents in recent years, and a sign of the tightening controls on media in China under leader Xi Jinping, the country's most authoritarian leader in a generation.

At 8.43 pm (local time), a terse report on the incident was published by the Beijing Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese capital, more than 7 hours after the blaze was put out and over 5 hours after rescue efforts wrapped up, CNN reported.

While some Chinese media outlets have since published in-depth reporting on the aftermath of the fire, the initial, lengthy silence has come to the dismay of some liberal Chinese journalists.