300 Children Believed Killed in China Movie Theater Fire : Asia: 1,000 students were watching cultural program. Blaze would be second major fire disaster in a month if unofficial death toll is accurate.

Fire swept through a movie theater in the remote Xinjiang region where more than 1,000 schoolchildren were attending a cultural program, the official Guangming Daily newspaper reported today.

A local official in Karamay, an oil city in northwest China, said as many as 300 children died in the blaze at the Friendship Hall cinema in that city, Reuters news agency reported. However, no official statement on the death toll had been released by this afternoon.

The Guangming Daily reported that the fire was under investigation and that Xinjiang officials were organizing a relief effort.

A local broadcast official quoted by Reuters said the blaze erupted in the middle of a performance at the theater after an explosion believed to have been sparked by an electrical fault.

If accounts of the death toll are accurate, the fire would be the second major fire catastrophe in China in less than a month. On Nov. 27, in Liaoning province north of Beijing, 233 people, mostly students, were killed in a blaze at a large dance hall.

Because of overcrowded public halls, inadequate firefighting equipment and often dangerous heating systems, fire remains a major cause of death in China. In the first nine months of this year, for example, officials reported that 1,300 people were killed in 27,236 fires.

Karamay is an oil boom town in the Junggar Basin 180 miles northwest of Urumqi in extreme northwest China, 100 miles from the border with Kazakhstan.

Before the discovery of oil there in 1956 it was a sparsely inhabited oasis.

But in 1992, Karamay’s population was listed at 200,000. A 1992 article by the official New China News Agency said the city has more than 100 primary and middle schools.

If the death count is confirmed, the Karamay blaze would be the most deadly in China since a 1979 movie theater fire, also in the Xinjiang region, that killed about 600 people.