Baghdad hospital fire kills 12 babies
Print Edition
A FIRE ripped through a maternity ward at a Baghdad hospital overnight, killing 12 newborn babies, government officials said yesterday, a deadly blaze that was likely caused by faulty electrical wiring.
By morning, grief-stricken fathers searched for their missing newborns in vain while angry relatives gathered outside the Yarmouk hospital in western Baghdad, blaming the government for the tragedy. Some of the babies who perished were prematurely born, a doctor at the hospital said.
The hospital director, Saad Hatem Ahmed, said the blaze broke out late on Tuesday night and that the initial investigation indicated it was an electrical fire. Ahmed said 29 female patients and eight babies were moved from the ward where the fire broke out and transferred to another hospital.
At the maternity ward, forensic teams in masks and protective gloves were seen searching through the rubble and charred pieces of furniture.
“Some of the dead babies were preemies but not all of them,” said one of the doctors at the Yarmouk hospital.
Outside, crying relatives claimed some of the babies were still missing and demanded an answer from authorities.
One father, 30-year-old Hussein Omar, a construction worker, said he lost twins in the blaze, a baby boy and a girl born last week. The hospital told him to go look for them at another Baghdad hospital where some of the patients were moved to during the fire.
He said he looked and couldn’t find them anywhere so he came back to Yarmouk. The hospital staff then told him to go look at the morgue. “I only found charred pieces of flesh,” Omar said. “I want my baby boy and girl back. The government must give them back to me.”
Nearby, Shaima Hassan stood dazed and trembling in shock after losing her 2-day-old son. The 36-year old had spent more than a year visiting hospitals in and outside Iraq trying to conceive. “I waited for ages to have this baby and when I finally had him, it took only a second to lose him,” she said, holding a bunch of blackened documents with her hands, covered with burns.
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