May 13, 2000 - China Jails 16 After Deadly Porno Theater Fire - By Reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese court has blamed a fire which killed 74 people at an illegal pornographic movie theater on the theater's staff, sentencing more than a dozen to jail terms, state media said Saturday.
The Intermediate People's Court in the central Chinese city of Jiaozuo, Henan province, handed life sentences to theater boss Han Benyu and to Niu Yuwen for responsibility for the March 29 blaze and for spreading pornography, Xinhua news agency said. Fourteen others were jailed for terms of at least two years, it said.
Police blamed an over-worked quartz heater for sparking the fire at the Paradise video parlor, which left victims' bodies so badly charred that most were unidentifiable, Xinhua said. The parlor, which contained two large video halls and 28 private screening rooms, had been opened without approval from fire officials and lacked fire safety facilities, Xinhua said.
Local residents had said theater staff would lock the exits when movies were being shown to keep police from entering. The building, a former city-owned foodstuffs company, was contracted to Han in 1998.
Similar catastrophes have struck several public halls in China over the past decade. In December 1994, 323 people, most of them children, were killed in a concert hall fire in the oil town of Karamay in the western region of Xinjiang. A month earlier, 233 people were killed in a dance hall fire in the northeastern province of Liaoning, many of them crushed to death or asphyxiated inside emergency exits that were chained shut. China's worst such fire was in 1977, when 694 people died -- 597 of them children -- in Xinjiang.