Special team set up to help families of fire victims in Jilin

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, February 16, 2004

Special team set up to help families of fire victims in Jilin

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A special team of 200 local officials has been formed to offer psychological counseling to the injured and families of those who died in a fireat a shopping mall in Jilin City, northeast China's Jilin Province.

Zhu Zhongmin, secretary of Jilin Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), also vowed to be honest in reporting on the disaster to stop rumors.

He pledged officials would work harder to establish the cause of the blaze and bring those responsible to justice as early as possible.

Details of compensation for the fire disaster victims would soon be worked out, he said.

The blaze started at 11:20 a.m. Sunday on the second floor of the Zhongbai Shopping Mall where many people were doing weekend shopping, leaving 53 people dead and 68 injured.

Built in the 1990s, the four-story building at a downtown crossroads linking two major streets accommodated 111 shops and about 120 shopkeepers within an area of 4,000 square meters. Thefirst and second floors of the building were for shopping, the third was a bathhouse, the fourth a games hall and a disco.

A preliminary investigation showed the fire started in a temporary storehouse near a boiler room.

Sun Huashan, deputy head of the State Administration for Supervision of Safety in Workplaces, traveled to Jilin City to oversee the handling of the disaster.

Sun called an urgent meeting in the early Monday shortly after his arrival in the city. He urged local Party and government authorities to learn from the accident and to improve safety in public places with a campaign to root out hidden safety risks.

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