Dozens Die In South Korea Fire

Police detained four electricians Sunday on suspicion they ignored safety regulations and touched off a fatal fire which left 54 dead and 71 injured.

The blaze, believed to have been started by electric sparks, swept through a three-story building in Inchon, 30 miles west of Seoul, on Saturday filling it with toxic smoke. Most victims were believed to have suffocated.

Police said the number of victims could rise, because some of the injured were in critical condition.

Police were holding the electricians for questioning but had not formally charged them.

The fire started in a karaoke salon in the basement and spread rapidly to higher floors. Everyone in the ground-floor restaurant escaped but more than 120 people in upper floors were trapped, they said.

Most of the victims were teenagers trapped inside a second-floor bar and a billiard parlor on the third floor, police said.

"It was a burning hell," said local police chief Park Myong-hwan, describing the scene of the burnt-out beer bar where most of the victims were found. "Some were moaning in pain. We brought them out first and practiced artificial respiration."

A police investigation showed that renovation work was under way at the karaoke salon when the fire broke out. Electric sparks were suspected to have dropped on freshly painted partition walls, touching off the fire, it said.

The flames raced quickly upward through a narrow corridor, burning plastic furniture and carpets. Toxic gas quickly filled the building, the windows of which were mostly blocked, police said.

"I heard a blast and then saw smoke filling up the building and people scrambling out," Park Hyun-sok, a witness, said on the cable television network YTN.

Fire fighters extinguished the blaze in 40 minutes, police said.

"There were so many people carried out of the building, but there were not enough ambulances and so firefighters left them on the pavement and rushed back inside to get more people out," witness Woo Sung-hwan, 43, was quoted as saying by the national news agency Yonhap.

Other witnesses said many victims were found huddled near the door on the second floor.

"All windows facing the street in the beer bar were blocked, forcing those inside to try to flee through the only door leading to the narrow corridor," said witness Kim Jun-kyu, 58.

Dozens of family members were wailing and praying outside the intensive care unit of the city's Inha University Hospital, where many victims were hospitalized.

Polaroid photographs of half a dozen victims were displayed on the hospital's notice board to help family members identify them.

State KBS-TV reported that the building, located in an entertainment district in the city center, was about 20 years old and lacked basic fire prevention facilities such as sprinklers.

Many past disasters have been blamed on lax safety regulatins.

Saturday's fire is the worst since a hotel fire killed 88 people in Seoul in 1974. Three years before that, another hotel fired killed 165 people in Seoul.

Written By Sang-Hun Choe