A fire broke out in a women's ward of a Moscow drug treatment hospital early yesterday, filling the ward with heavy smoke and killing 45 women who found themselves trapped between the fire and a locked gate, officials said.
It was the deadliest fire in the Russian capital in three years.
Russia's chief fire inspector, Yuri Nenashev, said he was "90 percent certain" that the fire was caused by arson. But Moscow city prosecutor Yuri Syomin said that investigators were looking into other possibilities, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
The fire erupted in a wooden cabinet in a kitchen at one end of a corridor on the hospital's second floor -- a factor that led to suspicions of arson -- and the only other exit, at the other end, was blocked by a locked gate, Nenashev said. The barred windows were shut with locks that hospital personnel could not open.
All 45 women were already dead by the time firefighters arrived, said Alexander Chupriyanov, the deputy emergency situations minister.
"Judging by the placement of the bodies, they really tried to get out," he said.
Yevgeny Bobylyov, a Moscow fire department spokesman, said that investigators were still working at the site of Hospital No. 17 in southern Moscow but that it was already clear that the first call to the fire department -- around 1:30am had come very late.
"Secondly, the hospital personnel worked very badly, they did not take steps to evacuate people in the early stages of the fire," he said.
One-hundred sixty people were evacuated from the five-story building, and 10 people were hospitalized with carbon monoxide poisoning, Bobylyov said. Firefighters put out the fire within an hour of the first call for help, he said.
Most victims died of asphyxiation, Bobylyov said; some died of burns, Syomin said. According to other reports two hospital staff members were among the dead.
ITAR-Tass said that the area of the fire was comparatively small, some 100m2, but that the heavy concentration of smoke killed people. Ekho Moskvy radio said that burning plastic wall coverings had worsened the heavy, toxic smoke.
The fire might have started in a pile of discarded materials, Syomin said.
A few ambulances were lined up outside the hospital, a nondescript, tan brick building in a residential neighborhood in southern Moscow. Reporters were kept well away from the building, set deep in a courtyard, but no obvious signs of fire or smoke damage were visible on the facade.
A van from the city's psychological health service pulled up outside the hospital and a few people went inside, presumably to provide counseling for relatives of the victims. The relatives were brought into the staff entrance to the hospital, well away from reporters. The government also set up a telephone hot line for relatives.
Nenashev said that fire inspectors had visited the hospital twice, in February and March, and that they had recommended the temporary closure of the facility after the second visit because of fire safety violations.
Russia records about 18,000 fire deaths a year -- roughly 10 times the rate in the US and 12.5 times higher than in Britain. Experts say fire fatalities have skyrocketed since the end of the Soviet Union, in part because of lower public vigilance and a disregard for safety standards.
Emergency response officials have ordered all health facilities in Moscow be inspected for fire safety compliance, agencies reported.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.