Huge fire kills 38 at Kazakhstan drug treatment centre

       Thirty-eight people were killed yesterday when a fire ripped through a drugs treatment facility in a city outside Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty, emergency officials said.
       There was no information on what caused the fire, which began at roughly 5.30am in Taldykorgan, but officials said the blaze spread rapidly because firefighters were not informed quickly enough.
       "According to tentative data,38 people were killed, of which 36 were patients and two were medical personnel," the Kazakh Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement.
       "The cause for the rapid spread of the fire was that the fire services received the announcement too late."
       Rescuers were able to save 40 patients and medical staff, the ministry said, while firefighters took hours to extinguish the blaze, which spread out over an area of almost 650 square metres.
       Prime Minister Karim Masimov immediately called for the creation of a commission to investigate the cause of the fire, according to a statement on the government's main web portal.
       "The country's prime minister has entrusted the commission with carefully investigating the cause of this tragedy,and taking exhaustive measures to render assistance to the victims," it said. The high-level commission will be lead by Vice-Prime Minister Serik Akhmedov.
       Deadly fires are common in the former Soviet Union, with retirement homes and other state-run facilities particularly prone to such accidents. In 2006, 45 women were killed when a fire erupted at a drugs treatment clinic in Moscow.The women had been trapped behind locked doors and barred windows.