Fire in Japan’s Osaka: It was extinguished after half an hour. (Represent)
Tokyo:
Fire officials said 27 people were killed after a blaze swept through a commercial building housing a psychiatric hospital in the Japanese city of Osaka on Friday.
Television footage showed dozens of firefighters working inside and outside the cramped office building after the blaze was extinguished.
The burned interior of the fourth floor, which houses a clinic that provides mental health services and general medical care, is visible through broken and blackened windows.
An Osaka police spokesman told AFP that officers were investigating the cause of the fire.
But he could not confirm a report by public broadcaster NHK, which cited police sources as saying there was “the possibility of an arson attack, given the circumstances at the scene”.
An Osaka fire department official told AFP news agency that 27 of the 28 people injured in the fire showed no signs of life. In Japan, only a doctor can officially confirm someone has died.
“The fire was discovered at 10:18 a.m. (01:18 GMT) on the 4th floor,” they said. “As of noon, 70 fire engines were on the scene.”
The fire, in a busy business area near Kitashinchi train station in the western Japanese city, was extinguished after half an hour, the official said.
While much of the building’s exterior remained intact from the fire, a middle-aged woman at the scene told NHK: “There was a lot of black smoke … there was a very strong smell.”
A young woman who witnessed the fire also told the broadcaster that she saw a woman trapped on the fourth floor.
“She leaned out (from the window) and said things like ‘Please help’… She seemed very weak. Maybe she inhaled a lot of smoke,” she said.
Osaka, a major economic center, is Japan’s second largest metropolis after the Tokyo region.
Deadly fires are unusual in Japan, a country with strict building standards and violent crime is also rare.
A year ago, a man was charged with murder in the 2019 Kyoto animation studio arson attack that left 36 people dead, the country’s deadliest violent crime in decades.
The attack sent shockwaves through the anime industry and its fans in Japan and around the world.
An arson attack on a video store in Osaka in 2008 killed 16 people. The assailant has now become a death sentence.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
