82 killed in Iraq as fire erupts at COVID-19 hospital

IslamNews – At least 82 people died in a huge hospital fire Saturday night in Iraq’s capital city of Baghdad, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said
Another 110 people were injured in the blaze at Ibn al-Khatib Hospital, according to ministry spokesman Major General Khaled Al-Muhanna.
The fire is believed to have started after oxygen tanks exploded, according to two health officials at the hospital.
Murtadha Riyadh’s grandmother and aunt were both on the hospital’s second floor ICU ward when the fire erupted.
He was nearby picking up medicine for his grandmother when he suddenly heard explosions, he told CNN. “I ran back to the hospital. I called them to check on them. They told me, ‘Don’t come up, we are being evacuated,’ but they could not make it.”
“I rushed to the first floor (of the hospital) to help but I could not, I was suffocating. Then fire broke out,” Riyadh said.
Minutes later health workers and neighborhood volunteers started carrying out charred bodies.
“Both my grandmother and my aunt died of suffocation,” Riyadh told CNN at a morgue in Baghdad where he waited to collect their bodies, bloody gashes from his failed rescue attempt still visible across one arm.
“No one could imagine this could happen, but it’s all bad management,” Riyadh told CNN. “I blame health sector.”

Source: CNN