The Haifeng County People's Court in south China's Guangdong Province is expected to soon start looking into compensation claims over the deaths of nine vagrants who were incinerated during a minivan fire.

Any compensation will go to the relatives of the people, who were being transported to a county holding center when the incident occurred on April 9, 2001.

"We expect to hold a hearing soon," the vice director of the court's Case Registration Division, who would only be identified as Huang, said on Friday. "The exact date will be announced later, when the court is sure that its official summons have properly reached the parties involved."

According to a report in the Nanfang Metropolitan Daily, a total of 25 people, all of whom were regarded as vagrants, died in the torched minivan. But only relatives of nine victims are asking for compensation.

The people were being taken to the Haifeng holding center for city vagrants and beggars after being removed from the streets.

The report claimed the fire was deliberately lit by of the vagrants in an effort to escape from the van.

It said the people in charge of the transportation process failed to open the door quickly enough and the vagrants did not stand a chance, given the blaze took hold on flammable chairs. The officials were later sentenced to between three and six and a half years in jail for dereliction of duty.

Because of such tragedies, China's civil affairs authority has replaced the two-decade-old Measures for the Internment and Deportation of Urban Vagrants and Beggars with the Measures on Aid and Management for Urban Vagrants and Beggars.

(China Daily August 9, 2003)