Fire swept through a northwest China karaoke club that had ignored orders to shut down last week, killing 51 people and injuring an undetermined number of others, an official said Tuesday.
The fire broke out early Monday at the club in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province, an official at the provincial foreign affairs office said.A report Tuesday in the Legal Daily newspaper quoted police and fire officials as saying that club exits were blocked or too narrow, preventing the victims from escaping.
An undetermined number of injured were hospitalized, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He could provide no further details.
On Friday, authorities ordered the club closed because its manager, Huang Lixin, had not obtained permission to open a business there. But Huang ignored the order, the report said.
It was the latest in a series of fires that have ravaged dance halls, cinemas and other public gathering places, leading the government to announce a fire prevention campaign.
A Dec. 8 theater fire in the Xinjiang city of Karamay killed 325 people, most of them children trapped inside because all but one exit was locked. A dance hall fire in November killed 288 people under similar circumstances.
The rising toll from fires has become a national embarrassment for China. Last year, a record 2,748 people died and 4,277 people were injured in nearly 40,000 fires.
So far, the government's calls for better fire safety appear ineffectual.
The managers of a hotel and shopping complex where 28 people died in March in northeastern Liaoning province had been warned repeatedly that the building was unsafe, official reports said.
Only 3 percent of the places checked during the province's last major fire inspection passed, while three-quarters had serious fire hazards, the newspaper Beijing Youth Daily reported.
Taiwan, too, has been plagued by fires in public clubs. In February, 64 people died in a central Taiwan karaoke bar in the island's deadliest blaze ever.