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Fire at psychiatric hospital kills three in southern Russia

An early morning fire in a psychiatric hospital in southern Russia yesterday killed three people and injured 12 others, officials said, while a gas explosion in another part of the country killed five people in an apartment house.

The blaze swept through the two-story structure around 5am and took two hours to extinguish, said Sergei Kozhemyaka of the Emergency Situations Ministry.

The cause has not been determined, but Kozhemyaka said that it may have been related to the misuse of heating devices. The local prosecutor's office opened a criminal investigation into the blaze, Interfax reported.

The hospital, which houses 48 patients, is located in the village of Doroganovo, about 65km outside Rostov-on-Don, which is 960km south of Moscow.

A gas explosion in a two-story apartment building in the Ryazan region, meanwhile, killed five residents, one of them a five-year-old child, according to Captain Aleksei Korneyev of the regional Emergency Situations Ministry. The blast occurred around 5.15am.

The blast destroyed a section of the apartment house, located in the village of Sarai, about 240km southeast of Moscow.

Each year, about 17,000 Russians die in fires -- a per-capita rate several times higher than in Western nations.

A nursing home fire in March in southern Russia claimed 63 lives. The local fire department had been disbanded, and fire crews took an hour to get to the scene.

In December, 45 women died in a fire at a Moscow drug treatment facility, where they were trapped by locked gates and barred windows. A fire at a Siberian mental hospital the next day killed nine patients.

Officials blame poor enforcement of fire regulations and improper construction for the large number of fire deaths. Some lawyers say the Russian court system fails to hold business and government accountable for safety.
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