MOSCOW: A pyromaniac at a mental hospital in Belarus killed 30 patients yesterday when he set fire to the building, the country's Emergencies Minister said.
Mr Valery Astapov said doctors and nurses in the town of Kozlovichi had lost crucial time trying to extinguish the blaze themselves when they discovered it in the early hours of the morning.
"The medical staff did all they could on their own to deal with the fire and save the patients, but it meant they only called the fire brigade half an hour after the blaze began," Mr Astapov said.
Rescuers arrived to find one of the hospital's blocks all but gutted, and could only pull two patients alive from the wreckage. They evacuated 30 patients from another building on the site.
Mr Astapov said the condition of the patients at the hospital in western Belarus, an impoverished ex-Soviet state sandwiched between Russia and Poland, had made their evacuation much slower.
Ms Natalya Petkevich, a spokeswoman for Belarussian President Mr Alexander Lukashenko, said the man who started the fire had tried to do so twice before, and that he had died in the blaze.