Firefighters took hours to tackle the blaze
A fire at a hospital facility for drug addicts in the city of Taldykorgan in south-eastern Kazakhstan has killed 38 people, according to officials.
The country's emergency ministry said 40 staff and patients were rescued. The fire was large, it said, covering 650 sq m (7,000 sq ft).
Prime Minister Karim Masimov is reported to have ordered an inquiry.
Safety regulations are often violated in Kazakhstan, with frequent workplace accidents and fires as a result.
There were almost 10,000 fires in Kazakhstan in the first eight months of 2009, AP news agency quoted the emergency ministry as saying.
Commission
According to one report, firefighters were still tackling the blaze hours after it started.
There are as yet no details on the cause of the fire, which broke out early on Sunday, or why it was so deadly.
Prime Minister Masimov immediately ordered a commission to be set up to investigate the cause of the fire, a government spokeswoman said, according to Russian news agency Ria-Novosti.
"Today the head of the government signed such a decree; the commission will be led by Deputy Prime Minister Serik Akhmetov who, in the nearest future, will be flying from Astana to Taldykorgan," a spokeswoman was quoted as saying.
A fire at a drug treatment hospital near Almaty, Kazakhstan, killed it least 38 
people on Saturday, authorities have said.

Ten more people have been hospitalised, two of them in critical condition.

The blaze started at approximately 05.30 local time (23.30 UTC) in Taldykorgan. The fire spread quickly, consuming almost 650 square metres of land.

"According to  tentative data, 38 people were killed, of which 36 were patients and two were medical personnel," the national emergency situation ministry stated. The ministry says that emergency crews managed to rescue up to forty people and medical personnel from the burning building.

Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhko said that the inhabitants of the building may have been hampered in their escape by locked doors and barred windows.

There was apparently no fire alarm on the premises, and firefighters had not been alerted to the fire quickly enough to contain it.

In a statement on the Internet, Kazakh prime minister Karim Masimov called for a commission to investigate the cause of the fire: "The country's prime minister has entrusted the commission with carefully investigating the cause of this tragedy, and taking exhaustive measures to render assistance to the victims."