A fire at a treatment centre for drug addicts in southern Kazakhstan has killed at least 37 people, officials said.
Forty others were rescued after the fire broke out around 5:30 a.m. local time Sunday and quickly spread throughout the one-storey building.
It was one of many state-run facilities offering treatment to addicts in the former Soviet Union.
Kazakhstan lies on the main drug trafficking route between Afghanistan and Western Europe. As flames consumed the building, some patients tried to escape through barred windows, officials said.
What caused the fire isn't clear. Kazakhstan's prime minister has called for the creation of a special committee to investigate, the RIA-Novosti news agency said.
Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhko said that inspectors had found a number of violations in the centre during a visit in May and that it had no alarm system.
Some of the violations had been fixed, but work on installing an alarm system hadn't begun, he said.
The building was made of wood and built in 1951, Agence France-Press reported.
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A fire at a treatment centre for drug addicts in southern Kazakhstan has killed at least 37 people, officials said.
Forty others were rescued after the fire broke out around 5:30 a.m. local time Sunday and quickly spread throughout the one-storey building.
It was one of many state-run facilities offering treatment to addicts in the former Soviet Union.
Kazakhstan lies on the main drug trafficking route between Afghanistan and Western Europe. As flames consumed the building, some patients tried to escape through barred windows, officials said.
What caused the fire isn't clear. Kazakhstan's prime minister has called for the creation of a special committee to investigate, the RIA-Novosti news agency said.
Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhko said that inspectors had found a number of violations in the centre during a visit in May and that it had no alarm system.
Some of the violations had been fixed, but work on installing an alarm system hadn't begun, he said.
The building was made of wood and built in 1951, Agence France-Press reported.
