Early morning fire rips through Azerbaijan drug rehab centre, killing 24 people
Video footage broadcast on local television showed huge flames leaping through barred windows of the single-storey wooden hospital ward
Dozens of people died in a fire that tore through a drug rehabilitation clinic in the Azerbaijani capital Baku early on Friday, officials said, revising an earlier death toll.
“At 6.10am 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 taken to hospital with serious burns, the statement said, citing a power grid defect as the initial cause of the blaze.
President Ilham Aliyev went to the scene, Azerbaijan’s APA news agency reported, while Russian President Vladimir Putin sent condolences.
