DIWANIYAH: The Iraqi health ministry and Red Cross announced that four children were killed in a fire in a maternity ward in southern Iraq on Monday.
The Iraqi Red Cross in a communique said that 150 children and 190 adults were evacuated from the blaze in the town of Diwaniyah, about 175 kilometres south of Baghdad.
Health minister Saleh al-Hasnawi during a press conference on the site after firemen had extinguished the flames said the fire was caused by an electrical short-circuit that lit materials belonging to a company renovating the health facility.
He said the smoke entered the building but not the fire. He said four prematurely born babies being treated in the neo-natal intensive care unit died of respiratory issues.
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Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani ordered sacking of those responsible for negligence.
Safety norms are not observed in the construction and transport sectors in Iraq.
In late September 2023, about a hundred people died in fire caused by fireworks in a marriage hall in the north of the country.
In July 2021, a blaze in the Covid ward of a hospital in the south killed 60 people. And a few months earlier, oxygen bottles’ explosion set off a fire in a Baghdad hospital that killed more than 80 people.
