Fire in meeting room forces staff members to jump out of building

BEIJING - A fire and a reported blast in a bank building in Tianzhu Tibetan autonomous county in Northwest China's Gansu province on Friday morning, injured 49 people, 19 severely.

Rescuers carry an injured man out of a bank building damaged by a fire in Tianzhu Tibetan autonomous county, in Gansu province, on Friday morning. The arson suspect was arrested eight hours after the incident. Forty-nine people were injured in the incident. [Lu Feng / China News Service]

A publicity official with the county government told China Daily it was "purely" arson, but Xinhua News Agency cited witnesses as saying that the fire was caused by a petrol bomb exploding.

Besides normal operations, paramilitary police joined the rescue in the county, which is 128 km from the provincial capital city, Lanzhou, and has about 70,000 Tibetan residents - a third of the local population.

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The street where the bank is located was sealed off for investigations on Friday and the police are interrogating a suspect, Yang Xianwen, who was arrested eight hours after allegedly "fleeing the scene".

The incident took place on the fifth floor of the Rural Credit Cooperatives building in the county at 8:25 am, when all the bank's employees were holding a meeting, the local government said at a press conference on Friday afternoon.

Tianzhu publicity office identified the suspect as former bank employee Yang Xianwen.

Yang, 40, a Han resident and a former accountant with the bank, was sacked for embezzlement in April 2011. The publicity office said he threw a "petrol bottle" into the meeting room out of revenge.

However, a witness who declined to be named, told Xinhua that someone ignited a homemade "gasoline bomb".

"The fire was put out very quickly and no blast happened," an official with the local government's publicity department told China Daily.

Photographs showed glass and parts of window frames scattered on the ground floor of the building, and three of the five windows facing the street were smashed while thick black smoke covered the other windows.

The blaze inside the meeting room was so fierce that, according to the publicity department, several people jumped out of the building and were injured when they tried to land on an adjacent three-story building.

The fire brigade and police refused to reveal any information to China Daily.

All the injured were taken to a local hospital, where doctors in emergency units said that no one was critically injured.

"As far as I know, the three ambulances we sent to the scene stopped transferring patients after 10 am. And the number of patients did not change after that", a hospital official, who do not want to be named, said.

The county government has allocated 60,000 yuan ($9,230) for the medical care of the severely injured.