Thirteen people linked to a hospital fire that killed 37 people
in northeast China's Jilin Province were sentenced to one to seven
years in jail by a local court on Tuesday.
The jailed include five officials from the City Central Hospital
of Liaoyuan and people who produced, sold, and laid the substandard
electric cables blamed for the fire.
They were charged with neglecting their duties and with the
production and sale of substandard products by Liaoyuan
Intermediate People's Court.
The fire occurred on December 15, 2005 in a four-storey building
which housed clinical, in-patient, and office departments.
At 4:30 PM the hospital experienced a power cut. Zhang Diankun,
head of the electrician team at the hospital, went to the
electrical distribution room on the second floor and turned the
power supply back on without checking the cause of the power cut.
He then left the room.
Hearing cracking noises in the room two or three minutes later,
Zhang returned to find plumes of smoke rising from the cables which
had caught fire.
Zhang immediately ran out of the building to switch off the
transformer but by the time he returned, the fire had started to
spread.
The 37 people who died were all in-patients and members of their
families who were visiting at the time. The fire injured 95 other
people, including ten medical workers, and caused economic losses
of 8.21 million yuan (US$1.07 million).
Zhang was sentenced to six years in prison. The hospital
president and two vice presidents were jailed one, three, and five
years. The director of the hospital general affairs department
faces three years in prison with a three-year reprieve.
Zhao Yongchun and Sun Fenglin, who were in charge of the workers
who laid the substandard cables, were jailed for seven and six
years respectively.
Two factory managers who produced the cables were given
suspended prison terms and fined between 70,000 and 100,000 yuan as
were those involved in selling the defective products.
(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2007)