Building fire kills 17 in Beijing
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A fire swept through a garment workshop building in the southern Beijing suburb Monday morning. |
Seventeen people were killed and 25 others injured in a southern Beijing suburb Monday morning in the deadliest fire the Chinese capital has seen in nine years.
Nine men and eight women died in the fire. Most of them were migrant workers seeking accommodation in the building, said Wang Xin, deputy chief of the Daxing District Committee of the Communist Party of China.
Out of the 17 dead, thirteen were workers hired by an unlicensed garment workshop called Yuyun and the other four were tenants in the four-story building. Eleven of the victims lived on the ground floor, said Wang.
The 25 injured people, including two children, were rushed to hospitals. All of the injured, except except for a 6-year-old girl, were treated at Beijing Jishuitan Hospital. The girl was hospitalized in Beijing Children's Hospital, according to a list provided by fire control headquarters.
The fire broke out around 1 a.m. Monday in a building in the town of Jiugong in Beijing's Daxing district. It raged for an hour before being extinguished around 2 a.m.
Officials and witnesses said the fire started in the garment workshop. Trapped people were seen screaming and smashing the workshop's barred windows in an attempt to escape.
Photos taken at the site showed that the windows of the building were blocked with iron bars, which were initially installed to ward off burglars. The bars prevented the trapped people from escaping.
"We saw people jumping from the building. About six or seven people, clad in pajamas, flung themselves from the first floor after kicking open the bars on one window," said Wang Xuegang, a local resident.
"It was a real nightmare. Some dived from the top floor and never rose again," said Wang.
