At least 64 people were killed, most of them patients, when a hospital’s new isolation ward caught fire in the southern city of Nasiriya.
After a catastrophic fire in southern Iraq that killed at least 64 people, some victims’ relatives gathered in the holy city of Najaf on Tuesday to bury their dead, while dozens more were left waiting in limbo outside the wreckage of the hospital in a nearby city where flames swept through a coronavirus isolation ward the night before. It was not immediately clear what caused the fire, at al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in Nasiriya, with health officials offering different explanations such as an electrical short or an exploding oxygen canister. Patients, relatives and health workers were among the dead from a blaze so intense that at least 22 of the bodies could not immediately be identified. In late April, a similar fire at a coronavirus hospital in Baghdad, the capital, killed more than 80 people and injured more than 100. It was believed to have been caused by a spark igniting improperly stored oxygen canisters. Some of the patients hooked up to ventilators were burned alive in their beds along with visiting relatives who would not leave them. The hospital had no working fire alarm and no sprinkler system and Iraq’s health minister at the time resigned in response.
