LUKA (Russia), Sept 13: Thirty-seven people were killed when a fire swept through an aged psychiatric hospital in northwest Russia late on Thursday night, the latest tragedy to hit the country’s mental health institutions.

The fire was apparently started by a patient who was either smoking or deliberately set fire to his bed at the hospital in the village of Luka, 220 kilometres southeast of Saint Petersburg, officials said.

The single-storey wood-and-concrete building housed around 60 male patients, including some who had amputated legs or were bed bound, and the institution had been previously warned by the authorities to improve its fire safety.

Local residents told AFP that one of the patients was believed to suffer from pyromania.

“During a fire in the Oksochi psychiatric hospital 37 people died,” regional investigators said in a statement, adding that 26 bodies had already been pulled from the wreckage.

A nurse perished in the fire while saving patients. She left behind a husband and four children, local residents said.

The fire, which broke out in the middle of the night, reduced the decrepit wooden building on the outskirts of a village beside a forest to smouldering wreckage.

Rescue teams were combing through the debris and taking away bodies in black plastic bags from the scene.

Novgorod region governor Sergei Mitin told AFP at the scene that 23 people had been rescued from the fire.—AFP