At least 10 people were killed and nine injured in a fire at a high-rise residential building reportedly under coronavirus lockdown restrictions in China's Xinjiang province, officials said on Friday, days after another major blaze left 38 people dead in central China.
It took firefighters about three hours to douse the fire in the bedroom of a 21-floor residential building, with the furniture, bedding, and other daily necessities catching fire, in Tianshan district of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on Thursday night, the local fire department said. Ten people died despite emergency treatment, and nine others who sustained injuries are stable, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. However, later reports and social media posts said the building was under COVID lockdown restrictions.
According to a report in the state-run Global Times, the community where the building is located is a COVID low-risk area and the residents could go down.
But a report in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post said such official media reports were greeted with skepticism online, with web users questioning whether that was really the case.
