Luka: A pre-dawn fire swept through a Russian psychiatric hospital Friday, killing 37 people, Russia's top investigative agency said. Authorities had long warned that the mostly wooden building dating to the 19th century was unsafe. It was the second such deadly blaze in less than five months, underlining the widespread neglect of fire safety standards in Russia.

The fire in the one-story hospital in the village of Luka in the northwestern Novgorod region erupted around 3 am on Friday and quickly engulfed the structure, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The fire was apparently started by a patient who was either smoking or deliberately set fire to his bed at the hospital, officials said.

The single-storey wood-and-concrete building housed around 60 male patients including 15 who were bedbound, and the institution had been previously warned by the authorities to improve its fire safety. "During a fire in the Oksochi psychiatric hospital 37 people died," regional investigators said in a statement, adding that 30 bodies had already been pulled from the wreckage.

State Rossiya 24 television reported that a nurse tried to put out the flames with a blanket but they spread quickly. The man who triggered the fire was saved, the station said. Emergency officials had demanded the facility be closed after it failed a fire safety check earlier this year. The hospital administration, however, won permission to use it until next year.

Emergency officials said 23 of the 60 people in the building when the blaze broke out were evacuated. Emergency teams were searching the ruins for more bodies and combing a nearby forest for patients who may have fled the blaze or wandered off. Russian officials, however, said from the start they had little hope of finding any survivors. The head of Russia's top state investigation agency flew to the area to personally oversee a probe.