Fire kills 21 in South Korean hospital

A fire at a hospital annex housing elderly patients in the southern South Korean killed 21 people early Wednesday, officials said.

One patient at the Hyosarang Hospital in Jangseong county, an 81-year-old man suffering from dementia, was detained in an investigation after security video footage showed him entering an area where the blaze began, police said.  Police declined to provide further details, saying the cause of the fire was still being investigated.

Twenty patients and a nurse died at the hospital, which specializes in caring for elderly patients who suffer from dementia and palsy, and seven others were injured, according to officials with the Jangseong Fire Department who spoke on condition of anonymity because of office rules.

The victims died after suffocating on poisonous gas, officials said.

There were 35 patients and a nurse on duty on the second floor of an annex of Hyosarang Hospital when the fire broke out, officials said. The cause of the fire, which was put out after about six minutes, was not immediately known.

Officials said that 45 people, including a nurse, were on the hospital's first floor but they all escaped.

Some of the dead had their hands bound to their beds, and the second-floor windows were barred, the Yonhap news agency reported, without citing any sources. Fire officials later Wednesday said that report was inaccurate.

Two hospital officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media, said that patients are not bound to beds. But they said they were checking into the details of what happened.

The fire comes as South Korea debates long-ignored safety lapses and a history of corner-cutting in a country that rapidly rose from poverty and the destruction of the 1950-53 Korean War to become Asia's fourth biggest economy.

Officials are still searching for more than a dozen bodies from a ferry sinking last month that left more than 300 people dead or missing, most of them high school students. South Korea has also had two subway accidents in recent weeks and a fire earlier this week at a bus terminal near Seoul killed eight people and injured 57.

The Associated Press