Fire at drug treatment centre kills 24 in Azerbaijan

Twenty-four people died as a result of a fire which tore through a drug rehabilitation clinic in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, early on Friday, officials said.

"A fire happened at the Republican Narcological Centre in Baku," the General Prosecutor's Office, the health, interior and emergencies ministries said in a joint statement.

"The bodies of 24 people have been found."

The blaze tore through a one-storey wooden ward, the statement added.

It cited a defect of the power grid as the initial cause of the blaze.

Earlier on Friday Azerbaijan's APA news agency reported that at least 30 people had perished in the blaze.

It said the fire broke out in a ward for bed-ridden patients.

Firefighters and rescuers of the country's emergencies ministry have extinguished the blaze and were investigating the causes.

The ex-Soviet Caucasus nation has a history of large-scale casualties as a result of fires in residential buildings and elsewhere.

In May 2015, 15 people – including five minors – were killed by a fire in a multi-storey building in Baku.

In October 1995, 289 people died in a metro fire in Baku, in the world's deadliest subway disaster that was caused by outdated Soviet equipment.