Two senior doctors at a hospital in southern Russia have been arrested after nine newborn babies died in just a few days earlier this month, investigators have said.
The chief doctor and acting head of the intensive care unit at Hospital No 1 in Novokuznetsk have been arrested on suspicion of negligence and of causing death through negligence following the deaths of the infants.
Why the children died has not been confirmed, but it is known they were all born between 1 December and 12 January and died during Russia’s long New Year holiday.
Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the State Investigative Committee, said in a statement the babies’ deaths were down to “the suspects’ improper performance of their official and professional duties in organising and providing medical care”.
Video released by investigators showed one man being escorted away in handcuffs by police and a medical worker answering questions from investigators.
Russian newspaper Argumenty i Fakty said the hospital had a poor reputation and that it had received at least five warnings from health authorities between August and November.
Inspections showed a lack of medicine for some conditions.
A woman who gave birth there said her baby died after its arm was torn off during birth, while another accused a medic of swearing at her, in unverified reports in other Russian media.
The fatalities provoked widespread shock and anger in Russia, where standards of medical care can vary vastly from world-class in major research hospitals to poor in some remote regional medical centres.
Novokuznetsk, a city of half a million people in southern Siberia, lies around 342 miles (550km) from the border with Kazakhstan.
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Professor Pavel Vorobyov, a prominent Russian doctor, said hospital staff should have “bust a gut” after the first death.
“When nine people have died and everyone is silent, something very strange is going on,” Argumenty i Fakty quoted him as saying.
Some politicians, commentators and ordinary Russians asked how the country could hope to raise its birth rate – a priority set by President Vladimir Putin – if such tragedies were allowed to happen.
