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The death toll rose to 29 on Wednesday from a fire at a Beijing hospital in one of the deadliest in the Chinese capital in at least two decades.
Social media shared a dramatic video of a man using a bed sheet tied to him to climb a wall to escape the smoke and flames after a fire broke out at Changfeng Hospital on Tuesday.
Broken and burning windows could be seen at the site, where many police officers, some in plainclothes, were present, Reuters witnesses said.
All but three of the 29 dead were patients, officials told a media briefing on Wednesday, with the fire extinguished within half an hour.
“There is a lot of smoke, I can see it,” said an elderly local resident who gave his surname only as Li.
Authorities are investigating Beijing’s worst fire since at least 2002, when a blaze at an internet cafe killed 25 people.
A preliminary investigation showed the fire, which mostly affected a wing for critically ill patients, was caused by flammable painting materials in the renovated ward, officials said.
By Wednesday, many social media posts critical of the fire on WeChat had been censored or deleted, a Reuters investigation showed.
“The rescue work at the scene was completed in 3-1/2 hours, but the public only learned that 21 had died in the fire when it was already 8pm,” one person wrote in a WeChat post that has since been deleted.
“It is surprising that there was no information about the fire that killed 21 people in a big dense city like Beijing before the official news.”
As of early Wednesday, 39 of the injured were still in hospital, three were critical, and 18 were serious, officials said in a briefing.
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