15:06 11.06.2019

Fire in Odesa psychiatric hospital could be caused by outside source of ignition

2 min read
Fire in Odesa psychiatric hospital could be caused by outside source of ignition

The fire in Odesa Regional Medical Center for Mental Health could have be caused by an outside source of ignition, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine has reported.

"It is tentatively known that the fire occurred as a result of an outside source of ignition brought [into the building]," the State Emergency Service said in a report on Tuesday.

Ruslan Bukhanets, deputy head of the department for preventing emergency situations at the State Emergency Service, said at a press briefing on Tuesday that the exact cause of the fire was being investigated.

He also noted that the building of the municipal non-profit enterprise Odesa Regional Medical Center for Mental Health was commissioned more than 50 years ago.

The deputy head of the department of response to emergency situations, Petro Korotynsky, said that patients of the medical institution were 70-90 years old. According to him, at the time of the fire, there were 59 people in the building, 52 of them were sick, and three were medical staff.

As reported, a fire broke out on the roof of a single-story building of Odesa Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in the Suvorovsky district of Odesa late on June 10. According to police, six people were killed in the fire (four died on the spot and two more died at hospital). Six more patients were hospitalized, one in grave condition.

A hospital nurse is among those killed in the fire. The preliminary cause of death is carbon monoxide poisoning. Those deceased are being identified, and their bodies were sent for examination.

The police opened criminal proceedings under paragraph 1 and paragraph 5 of Part 2 of Article 155 (premeditated murder) and Part 2 of Article 270 (violation of fire safety requirements established by law) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

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