Investigators say 37 dead in Russian mental hospital fire

         
A fire at a Russian psychiatric hospital on Friday killed 37 people, the top investigative agency in the province where the blaze occurred said.
   
The bodies of 10 of the 37 victims were recovered from the ruins of the building that burned down in a pre-dawn fire, the Novgorod regional branch of Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement, without giving details on the other 27 victims.

The fire in the one-story hospital in the village of Luka in the northwestern Novgorod region erupted at around 3 a.m. local time Friday (around 2300 GMT Thursday) and quickly engulfed the mostly wooden structure dating back to the 19th century, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.                 

Emergency had demanded the facility be closed, but the hospital administration won permission to use it until next year.                  

Officials said the blaze was likely sparked by a smoking patient, and state Rossiya 24 television reported that a witness account confirmed that. It said that the man who triggered the fire was saved.                  

Emergency officials said that 23 of 60 people who were in the building when the blaze broke out were evacuated. Emergency teams found the bodies of two patients and a nurse, who they said died while trying to rescue others.                 

Russia has a poor fire safety record, with about 12,000 deaths reported in 2012. By comparison, the U.S., with a population roughly double Russia's, recorded around 3,000 fire deaths in 2011.           


AP/REUTERS