Thirteen people linked to a hospital fire that killed 37 people in northeast China's Jilin Province were sentenced to one to seven years in jail by a local court on Tuesday.

The jailed include five officials from the City Central Hospital of Liaoyuan and people who produced, sold, and laid the substandard electric cables blamed for the fire.

They were charged with neglecting their duties and with the production and sale of substandard products by Liaoyuan Intermediate People's Court.

The fire occurred on December 15, 2005 in a four-storey building which housed clinical, in-patient, and office departments.

At 4:30 PM the hospital experienced a power cut. Zhang Diankun, head of the electrician team at the hospital, went to the electrical distribution room on the second floor and turned the power supply back on without checking the cause of the power cut. He then left the room.

Hearing cracking noises in the room two or three minutes later, Zhang returned to find plumes of smoke rising from the cables which had caught fire.

Zhang immediately ran out of the building to switch off the transformer but by the time he returned, the fire had started to spread.

The 37 people who died were all in-patients and members of their families who were visiting at the time. The fire injured 95 other people, including ten medical workers, and caused economic losses of 8.21 million yuan (US$1.07 million).

Zhang was sentenced to six years in prison. The hospital president and two vice presidents were jailed one, three, and five years. The director of the hospital general affairs department faces three years in prison with a three-year reprieve.

Zhao Yongchun and Sun Fenglin, who were in charge of the workers who laid the substandard cables, were jailed for seven and six years respectively.

Two factory managers who produced the cables were given suspended prison terms and fined between 70,000 and 100,000 yuan as were those involved in selling the defective products.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2007)