Blaze at Russian mental hospital kills 37

A fire killed 37 people in a Russian psychiatric hospital Friday, the second deadly blaze at such a facility this year, heightening concerns about safety standards at Russia's wards for the mentally ill. Some of the patients killed in the blaze were reportedly under sedation at the time.

The inferno left little but the concrete foundation of the single-story building housing male patients at the hospital.

There have been many deadly fires at state institutions like hospitals and schools over the past decade, raising questions about safety standards. Russia is also dogged by transport and industrial accidents, which critics say results from a culture of negligence bred by President Vladimir Putin's top-down ruling style.

The fire was started by a patient who was either smoking or deliberately set fire to his bed at the hospital in the village of Luka, 137 miles southeast of Saint Petersburg, officials said, according to AFP.

The pre-dawn fire razed a dilapidated ward for severely ill patients at the hospital in a provincial village north of Moscow, as fog slowed firefighters travelling from 28 miles away.

Emergency authorities had recently sought to have the run-down wood, brick and concrete building condemned as unfit for use, a senior official said. Federal authorities began a criminal inquiry into suspected negligence.

State television showed firefighters spraying water on the smoking, blackened ruins of the ward at the hospital -- footage that has become grimly familiar after a number of deadly fires at state institutions in Russia in recent years.

A female orderly died while trying to save patients at the hospital in the village of Luka, which is in Novgorod province between Moscow and St. Petersburg, the regional branch of the federal investigative committee said in a statement.

It said 37 people were killed, and the Emergency Situations Ministry said 15 bodies had been recovered by midday.

More than 20 patients were evacuated after the fire broke out shortly before 3 a.m. local time. An official initially said some others may have escaped on their own, but none had been found hours later by police combing the area.

The fire was the latest tragedy to hit a medical institution in Russia, which struggles with outdated Soviet-era infrastructure and lax security procedures.

Critics say Russian President Vladimir Putin has made little progress stemming the corruption and corner-cutting blamed for many deadly accidents.

Yuri Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, said the shabby state of psychiatric hospitals was pushing up death tolls from fires. He said a third of the buildings at such facilities had been declared unfit for use since 2000.

The Kremlin's human rights envoy, Vladimir Lukin, sounded the alarm over the state of psychiatric hospitals in the country, calling for a joint effort to improve oversight.

"The entire society, people should protect citizens who have found themselves in a unique, difficult situation when they cannot protect themselves," Lukin said on popular radio station Moscow Echo.

In April, a fire that ravaged a psychiatric hospital in the Moscow region killed 38 people, most of them patients engulfed by flames as they slept behind barred windows.

In 2006, a fire in a Moscow drug rehabilitation clinic killed 45 women, many of whom were trapped by metal bars on the windows that staff could not open.

Al Jazeera and wire services