Azerbaijan rehab centre fire kills 25

Twenty-five people perished in a fire which tore through a drug rehabilitation clinic in the Azerbaijani capital Baku early yesterday, with activists saying safety standards had not been met.

Video footage broadcast on local television showed huge flames leaping through barred windows of a one-storey wooden hospital ward.

It took some three hours for 10 squads of firefighters and rescuers from the emergencies ministry to extinguish the blaze, the APA news agency reported.

President Ilham Aliyev, who went to the scene, has set up a governmental commission to probe the cause of the blaze and ordered financial aid to be allocated for the families of the victims, his office said.

Four more people were hospitalised with serious burns, a statement said, citing a power grid defect as the initial cause of the blaze.

More than 200 patients and medical staff were evacuated unharmed, the statement added.

The General Prosecutor's office said it has launched a criminal investigation over alleged violation of fire safety norms.

Civil activists blamed official corruption and the failure to respect safety regulations as the factor causing large numbers of casualties in increasingly frequent fires in Azerbaijan.