China poultry plant fire kills 112
BEIJING (AFP) — At least 112 people were killed in a fire at a poultry processing plant in northeastern China yesterday, local officials said, in what appeared to be the country’s worst blaze in 12 years.
More than 300 workers were at the Baoyuan poultry plant at Dehui in Jilin province when the fire broke out and emergency workers searching for survivors were uncertain how many remained trapped inside, Xinhua news agency said.
“As of 3:20 p.m., altogether 112 people had died,” the Jilin provincial government information office said on its Weibo account, a service akin to Twitter.
The latest post did not say how many were injured, but an earlier one had put the number at 54.
It is the country’s worst fire for more than a decade, according to listings on Baidu, an Internet portal. On Dec. 25, 2000, a blaze at a shopping center in Luoyang, in the central province of Henan, killed 309 people.
The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear, but state broadcaster CCTV said eyewitnesses had heard a blast and suspected a leak of liquid ammonia.
CCTV also said on its Weibo account that the blaze might have started with an electric spark in the plant.
A dramatic photo taken earlier in the day from an unnamed Weibo account and posted on a Hong Kong-based online news portal showed dense clouds of black smoke several times higher than the low-slung plant.
A bright blaze could be seen inside a row of windows in one part of the processing plant.
The image could not be independently verified, although the building looked similar to the one shown by CCTV.