Siberia Mall Blaze: Death Toll From Russia Fire Rises to 64

Local Editor

Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said on Monday that at least 64 people had been killed in a fire in a shopping mall in the Siberian city of Kemerovo.

News agencies said more than 100 people had been evacuated from the "Winter Cherry" shopping mall, which contains cinemas, restaurants and shops.

There was no immediate indication of the cause of the fire. Television pictures showed people jumping from the windows of the mall, which was engulfed in black smoke. Kemerovo is a coal-producing region some 3,600 km (2,200 miles) east of Moscow.

People are coming to the scene of a deadly fire in Russia's Siberian city of Kemerovo to express their condolences and commemorate those, who didn't manage to escape the building devoured by the fire. Flowers and toys cover the place of the incident in remembrance of the horrifying number of innocent children who lost their lives.

The first reports of the fire surfaced on Sunday afternoon; the police encircled the area and began evacuating people. The emergency services reportedly deployed some 15 fire teams, while the national center for crisis management announced that over 660 people were engaged in emergency response activities.

Witnesses have insisted that fire alarms in the trade center, which was completely packed, failed to go off, causing people to panic and rush through narrow corridors in a movie theater and children's playground, filled with black smoke; some jumped out of windows to save their lives.

The head of the city's fire department Sergei Yakovlev said that the blaze had spread via flammable thermal insulation that complicated the process of extinguishing the inferno.

The official cause of the conflagration has yet to be determined, although reports suggest that it could have been started by a child misusing a cigarette lighter or malfunctioning electrical wires.

In an interview with the channel Rossiya 24, child ombdusman Anna Kuznetsova has suggested that the reason for the fire was negligence of security norms.

"Negligence is the cause. All norms are written. But the way we treat these [security] norms is the catastrophic cause of the tragedy we have witnessed today," Kuznetsova said.

Russia's Investigative Committee has launched a criminal investigation into the case, having reportedly arrested four suspects, including the head of the management company, servicing the shopping mall.

According to recent data, confirmed by the Russian Investigative Committee, the death toll has risen to 64 people. Earlier, a source with emergency services reported that 69 people were still missing, including 40 children.

"According to preliminary figures, a search for 41 children is ongoing," the emergency center reported.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team