MINSK (AFP) -- Residents of the Belarusian village of Randilovichy were in shock Monday after a local psychiatric hospital burned down, killing 30, in what officials called the worst fire in the former Soviet republic in 50 years.

"Nobody is doing anything, no one has eaten, everyone is so weighed down by this," a woman who lives in the Randilovichy village, around 200 kilometers (120 miles) west of the capital Minsk, told Belarusian television.

The fire broke out at the psychiatric hospital at Randilovichy in the early hours of Sunday, killing 30 people, most of them patients, Minister for Emergency Situations Valery Astapov told reporters.

One person was missing and probably also died in the blaze, which may have been caused by a patient at the hospital known to be pyromaniac.

The tragedy comes on the heels of a number of other attempts to start fires at the hospital, Astapov told journalists.

Thirty-one other patients and eight members of the staff were safely evacuated from the building, which had not been equipped with firefighting systems.

"The building caught fire in no time because the blaze spread through its wooden structure," said the minister.

Employees tried in vain to put out the fire themselves and only called firefighters 30 minutes later, he added. When they finally arrived the building was already gutted.

"If the personnel had called us earlier instead of trying to save the patients on their own, we could have saved more people or even prevented the tragedy," Astapov pointed out. "Our specialists believe that the most likely cause of the fire is that it was started by one of the patients," he said. "We have determined that there were earlier incidents when patients suffering from pyromania have started fires."

Astapov said patients, most of whom had been on tranquilizers, were believed to have died in their sleep. Some "patients did not listen to their rescuers and two of them even returned to the building, (where they were) burned alive," he added.

Witnesses told the Belarusian television that most of the patients were elderly, and that there were no children at the hospital.

According to Astapov, this was the worst fire in Belarus since 1952, when more than 50 people burned alive in a village movie theater.