Twelve people are still being held responsible for the fire at his hospital Beijingwhich killed 29 people, according to the latest death toll released by authorities, making it the deadliest since 2002 in the Chinese capital.

Around the health facility, heavy police forces – including plainclothes officers – prevented and discouraged passers-by from observing or filming the scene of the disaster, AFP journalists found.

The main entrance of the building looks like intact on the outsidebut pictures of the interior, posted on the Caixin news website, show beds burned and walls blackened by the flames.

On one of the facades of the hospital building complex, windows and walls with visible smoke marks and at least one broken window can be seen.

“I don’t have a relative who is hospitalized or affected by the fire, I just came to see the situation,” said a resident of the capital, who did not want to be named.

“I think this is the worst hospital tragedy in the history of Beijing. I wonder what could have caused the fire”, said another citizen, “it is a hospital with a rather good reputation”, he emphasized.

The authorities were notified about the fire at Changfeng Hospital in Fengtai District yesterday just before 13:00 (local time; at 08:00 Greek time).

The flames were extinguished half an hour later and rescue crews moved away 71 patients within the two hours that followed, according to the official Beijing Daily newspaper.

The newest account, which speaks of 29 dead, was released by Li Zhongrong, vice mayor of Fengtai suburb, where the hospital is located. The deputy mayor expressed his “sincere condolences” to the relatives of the victims.

The previous official count was 21 dead.

According to Mr. Lee26 of the dead were patients. The fire broke out in a ward where patients in a serious or critical condition were being treated, he explained.

As part of the research twelve persons were arrested, among them the director of the hospital and employees of a company that had undertaken renovation work on it, according to Sun Haitao, an official with Beijing’s security services.

Until yesterday, the deadliest fire in the Chinese capital was the one that occurred in June 2002 in an internet cafe, which killed 25 students.

Dramatic images of people who tried to escape the flames by climbing into air-conditioning units abroad, or hung from bed sheets before jumping into space, have been circulating on Chinese social media sites, but some posts on the matter have been deleted, particularly comments criticizing the delay in informing citizens regarding the tragedy.

One of them, according to the Reuters news agency, criticized the hospital administration for boasting about the readiness of the health structure to face fires as recently as February, in a post on the WeChat platform; another that “while the work of the rescue crews was completed in 3.5 hours, the world learned that 21 people died when it was already past eight in the evening”; a third that “it is very strange that we learned so little about a fire which claimed the lives of so many people in such a large city like Beijing”.

Yin Li, the secretary of the local Communist Party organization in Beijing, who went to the site, called it “priority number one” to offer “caring for the injured”, according to the Beijing Daily.

Families of patients said they had no news or contact with their relatives, many of whom are elderly with mobility problems, the Chinese Youth Daily, another official newspaper, reported.

Deadly fires are common in China, due to inadequacies of the fire safety regulation and the corruption of officials responsible for its enforcement. However, in comparison, they are much rarer in Beijing.

In November 2022, ten people died when a fire broke out in a block of flats in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (in the northwest), sparking outrage against restrictive measures to deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic, which were seen as preventing the work of rescue teams.

Also in November, 38 people died in a factory fire in Anyangk (central), which the authorities attributed to wrong handling of a machine by an employee