Tight security blamed for deaths in Moscow fire

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Fire set by patient?
State-run Channel One television, without citing sources, said there was information the fire could have been set by a patient who was denied drugs while in withdrawal — a scenario that would draw blame away from hospital staff.

Bobylyov, the fire department spokesman, said that “hospital personnel worked very badly, they did not take steps to evacuate people in the early stages of the fire.” He said firefighters put out the fire within an hour of the first call for help, but that the 1:30 a.m. call came very late after the fire.

Bobylyov said 160 people were evacuated from the five-story building, and the prosecutor’s office said 12 people were hospitalized. A doctor at Moscow’s main burn center said doctors were fighting to save the life of a woman with burns on 95 percent of her body.

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NTV reported that the ward where the fire broke out had 50 patients, and only seven survived.

Relatives entered through the hospital’s staff entrance, well away from reporters. One woman cried out in anguish. A man sobbed softly and wiped tears from his eyes, his head bowed close to the building’s brick wall.

The RIA-Novosti news agency cited two patients as saying that security measures had contributed to the death toll. They noted that all wards at the hospital were locked at night. Those two patients left the hospital after the fire, vowing not to return.

Deadliest in decades
The fire was the deadliest in Moscow in decades. In 1977, a blaze at the massive Rossiya Hotel near the Kremlin — torn down this year — killed 42 people according to an official toll that some believe to be significantly higher.

In November 2003, a pre-dawn fire swept though a dormitory for foreign students who had been quarantined for medical checks, killing 43. Many were trapped behind permanently locked exits, causing some to leap from the five-story building.

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.

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

Metal gates on a building’s stairwells trapped the victims of a fire that killed nine people in January in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok.

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