Twelve newborn babies on Wednesday, August 10, were killed in a fire at a hospital in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities said.
Advertisement
“I came with milk powder for him, and then this happened. they shut the electricity and the doors”, she said.
Officials said “It took three hours to put out the blaze, which broke out overnight inside the maternity unit at the Yarmouk Hospital, in the city’s west”.
Electrical fires are common in the Iraqi capital and elsewhere across the country because of poor wiring.
Nearby, Shaima Hassan stood dazed and trembling in shock after losing her two-day-old son, who she had spent more than a year visiting hospitals in and outside Iraq trying to conceive. Their path was blocked by a wall of thick smoke.
“Then someone broke a window and threw me out”, she said.
“We asked the help of one of the employees, but she said, ‘I can not help you with anything, because it’s a fire”. “It was a frightful scene”.
“My son’s birth was hard”, Hussein told reporters at the hospital. I have had medical treatment to have a baby.
Devastated parents blamed the hospital and government for their babies’ deaths, with rumors flying that fire extinguishers were not working and that safety standards were not up-to-par. “It looks like charcoal”.
“I went to the other hospital, they are not there, so where are they?” he said. But he could not find them.
“I only found charred pieces of flesh”, a crying Omar told the AP. ‘I want my baby boy and girl back.
Hassan Omar said he was upset that the hospital would not give him information about his twins other than that he may have to have DNA checks to see if they were among the dead.
Eshrak Ahmed Jaasar, 41, said she is unable to find her four-day-old nephew.
Ms Jaasar added: “We pay the hospital employees thousands of Iraqi dinars to allow us in to get our loved ones basic food and milk, which they can not provide”.
The tragic incident occurred on Tuesday night at a maternity ward at the Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, according to Iraq’s Health Ministry spokesman, Ahmed al-Roudaini. “The blaze spread very quickly and caused a lot of damage”.
Advertisement
Among the disturbing images were cockroaches crawling between broken tiles, trash that had not been taken out, and patients lying on stretchers in the hospital’s courtyard.
