56 dead in Hanoi bldg blaze

HANOI, Sept 13 (AFP): 56 people died in a fire at an apartment block in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, state media said Wednesday, with witnesses reporting screams from inside and a small boy thrown from the building.
The fire started just before midnight on Tuesday (1700 GMT) in the parking floor of the 10-storey building, an area packed with motorbikes, witnesses said.
More than 100 people managed to escape or were pulled from the building by rescuers, with authorities rushing 54 to hospital, including "dozens of dead", the official Vietnam News Agency said.
The deputy minister of public security, Le Van Tuyen, said that "the number of losses in the fire was huge", state media reported, although authorities have yet to release an official toll.
At least three children were among the dead, according to reports. "I heard a lot of shouts for help. We could not help them much," said Hoa, a woman who lives near the block and gave only one name.
"The apartment is so closed with no escape route, impossible for the victims to get out," she told AFP at the site. Photos by AFP photographers on the scene overnight showed flames and smoke billowing from barred balconies.
The blaze was out by Wednesday morning, but rescuers still struggled for hours thereafter to access the building, which is down a narrow alley in a residential area of southwest Hanoi.
The complex's small balconies were surrounded by iron bars, with the apartment block having only a single exit-and no emergency ladder on the outside. Around 150 people lived in the complex, authorities said. Another witness, Huong, said a small child was thrown from an apartment to escape the flames.
"The smoke was everywhere. There was a little boy thrown from a high floor, I don't know whether he survived or not although people used a mattress to catch him," she said. Neighbours reported several others jumping from the block.
"There was a middle-aged woman jumping down onto my terrace here. She hit her arm and broke it. Another person also jumped down here and broke their legs," said Dao To Nga. "A child was put into a plastic basket and lowered down".
Some were able to flee the building using her roof. "This rooftop of my family helped 14-15 people escape," she said. One survivor, Nguyen Thi Minh Hong, told AFP that her family waited in their seventh-floor apartment at the back of the building for five hours before help arrived.