The death count was kept at 21 pm at 6 pm.
Beijing:
A fire at a Beijing hospital has killed 21 people, the official Beijing Daily said on Tuesday.
Emergency response teams received information just before 1 a.m. (0500 GMT) that a fire broke out at Beijing Changfeng Hospital in the capital city’s Fengtai district, the Beijing Daily reported.
Big Breaking: #Beijing
At least 25 people have died in a fire at a hospital in Beijing.Do you remember China mocking India when the Serum Institute in Hyderabad caught fire during the Covid crisis.
Karma strikes back.#hospital#Fire#china newspic.twitter.com/qaHoRhbplZ— Ashutosh Pandey (@Iashutoshp) April 18, 2023
The fire was doused after about half an hour and the rescue efforts continued for about two hours, by which time a total of 71 patients had been evacuated and shifted to another location.
The death toll was put at 21 at 6 p.m., the report said.
The Beijing Daily said “the cause of the accident is under further investigation”.
Social media users posted videos through the afternoon of people sitting on outdoor air conditioning units while others jumped from the building while clinging to ropes.
It was not immediately clear whether all of the hospital’s occupants had been found and evacuated from the fire, which was in the private hospital’s former inpatient department building.
The death was confirmed after the victims were taken to another undisclosed hospital for emergency treatment, the report said.
No further information was available on the number of injured or their condition in the fire.
Beijing Changfeng Hospital is in the western urban area of the capital, about 25 minutes by car from central Tiananmen Square.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)