Kolkata, India: Indian police arrested six hospital officials Friday on charges of culpable homicide after a fire in their medical facility killed 88 people.
Top state officials in West Bengal had accused the staff at AMRI Hospital of abandoning their patients and fleeing as smoke and flames poured through the building in the pre-dawn hours Friday.
Six directors from the hospital company were charged with culpable homicide and surrendered to police in the eastern city of Kolkata, police said. The police spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
"It was horrifying that the hospital authorities did not make any effort to rescue trapped patients," said Subrata Mukherjee, West Bengal state minister for public health engineering. "Senior hospital authorities ran away after the fire broke out."
The hospital expressed regret over the deaths, and denied any violations of safety measures.
As the fire raged, rescue workers on long ladders smashed windows in the upper floors of the AMRI Hospital to pull trapped patients out before they suffocated from smoke inhalation, while sobbing relatives waited on the street below. Rescue workers took patients on stretchers and in wheelchairs to a nearby hospital.
Moon Moon Chakraborty, who was in the hospital with a broken ankle, called her husband S. Chakraborty at home to tell him a fire had broken out.
"She had died by the time I reached the hospital," her husband said.
The fire killed 73 people, including three hospital workers, said Satyabrata Upadhyay, a senior vice president of the AMRI hospital company. The remainder of the dead were presumably patients and relatives who were aiding in their care. Rescue officials said many of the dead suffered from smoke inhalation.
At the time of the blaze, there were 160 patients in the 190-bed hospital annex, Upadhyay said.
The loss of life was "extremely unfortunate and painful," but the facility followed strict fire safety measure, he said. He promised to give 200,000 rupees, (about $4,000) to the relatives of the dead.
“We deeply sympathize and share the pain and agony of the family members of the patients admitted here,” he said.
The expensive AMRI private hospital was recently rated one of the best hospitals in the city by an Indian magazine. However, safety regulations are routinely ignored at hospitals throughout India.
