Twenty-seven people were presumed dead in the fire on Friday of a commercial building in a central district of Osaka, the main metropolis in western Japan, according to local firefighters interviewed by AFP.
“Twenty-seven people are in cardio-respiratory arrest,” a spokesperson for the firefighters told AFP, an expression used in Japan to talk about deaths still not officially confirmed by a doctor. A 28e no one was evacuated injured.
“The fire was detected at 10:18 am (01:18 GMT, Editor’s note) on the fourth level of this eight-story building,” added this spokesperson, specifying that the disaster could be extinguished about half an hour later.
Some 70 fire trucks were on site. The television channels showed dozens of firefighters hard at work inside and in front of this narrow office building, whose damaged floor was visible from the outside through its broken and blackened windows.
The floor ravaged by the flames housed a clinic providing psychological and general care, according to local media.
The cause of the incident was not yet determined and was under investigation, Osaka police told AFP.
“Possibility” of a criminal act
However, according to a police source quoted by the public television channel NHK, there is “a possibility that the fire was arson, given the circumstances at the scene.”
A young woman who witnessed the fire told NHK that she saw a woman trapped on the fourth floor.
“She leaned out (by a window, Editor’s note) and said things like ‘Please help me” (…) She seemed very weak. She may have inhaled a significant amount of smoke, ”she said.
“There was a lot of black smoke (…), there was also a very strong smell,” a middle-aged woman, another witness to the fire, told NHK.
Osaka, a major economic center, is the second largest metropolis in Japan after the greater Tokyo area.
Fatal fires are infrequent in Japan, which has strict building standards, and violent crime is rare as well.
A year ago, a man was charged with murder following an arson attack in July 2019 at an animation studio in West Kyoto that left 36 people dead, the deadliest crime in Japan in decades. decades.
In 2008, an arson attack on a video rental store in Osaka left 16 people dead and the perpetrator was sentenced to death.