Twenty-four people were killed after a fire raced through a mental-health clinic on the fourth floor of an office building in Osaka, Japan, and police said they suspected arson.
An Osaka police spokesman said the fire was under investigation as a possible case of murder and arson.
Police said 24 people were confirmed dead and an additional four people were injured. One had minor injuries, while the condition of the other three survivors wasn’t known, police said. Initially police had said 27 people were feared dead.
Public broadcaster NHK, citing police, said two women in the clinic’s waiting room saw a man who appeared to be in his 50s or 60s enter the clinic and place a paper bag near a heater. The man kicked the bag and a liquid coming out of it caught fire, according to the witness accounts cited by NHK. It said the man stayed at the scene and is believed to be among the dead or injured.
The blaze in Osaka’s central business district broke out shortly after the clinic opened for business Friday morning. Within a half-hour of the first call to the fire department, it was extinguished, a city official said, and the building didn’t appear to suffer major structural damage.
Firefighters worked at the scene of the blaze on Friday.
Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
But witnesses described dark gray smoke pouring out of the fourth-floor windows, parts of which were charred black after the fire was put out. The inside of the fourth floor, illuminated by the flashlights of investigators, was almost completely burned out.
Erika Takahashi witnessed the fire and said she had visited the clinic a couple of times for sleeping pills. She said she believed patients and staff would easily get trapped inside if a fire started at the entrance and spread inside the clinic because the emergency stairs were near the elevator at the entrance.
Ms. Takahashi, a 36-year-old employee of a real estate agency on the first floor of a building across the street, said she didn’t remember any windows in the clinic apart from those facing the street. Those windows opened only a crack, she said.
Another witness, a shopkeeper across the street, said there was a strong burning smell and flames were visible only on the fourth floor, while the floors above and below didn’t appear to be on fire.
A doctor at a hospital that received victims told NHK that they died of carbon monoxide poisoning and there were few external injuries.
Osaka is the center of Japan’s second-most-populous urban area after the Tokyo region.
Write to Miho Inada at [email protected] and Alastair Gale at [email protected]
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