MOSCOW — At least 64 people, many believed to be children, perished in the Siberian city of Kemerovo as a massive fire swept through a crowded shopping center where fire exits had been blocked, officials said Monday.
About 40 people were treated at the site, and at least 10 others were hospitalized, according to Russia’s Ministry of Health. Emergency services officials said that 64 is the final death toll, but local media reported that dozens of people could be missing. Some bodies will require genetic testing to identify, officials said.
Within hours of opening an investigation into the cause of the fire, the Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said authorities were looking into several “serious violations” of fire safety codes. Petrenko said fire exits were blocked, and a private security guard turned off the fire alarm after receiving notice of the fire.
Kemerovo is nearly 2,000 miles east of Moscow. Sunday was the first day of a week-long school holiday in Russia. On social media, friends and family shared photos of children believed to have been at the mall when the fire broke out. Other videos showed men attempting to break through a locked door in a stairwell to escape encroaching flames.
One of the hospitalized victims was an 11-year-old boy who jumped out of a fourth-floor window to escape the blaze. He was described by authorities Monday as being in serious condition and emotionally traumatized.
“He lost his parents and younger sister in this tragedy,” Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said, adding that he suffered several broken bones and is on a respirator.
The Kommersant newspaper reported that 288 firefighters arrived with 62 firetrucks to battle the blaze, which took 19 hours to extinguish and covered an area of 1,500 square meters (16,000 square feet). The roof over the burned area collapsed, and at least 59 people — 41 of them children — were reported missing by the RBC news outlet.
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About 12 of the missing children were in one of the mall’s three movie theaters, which rescuers have so far been unable to access due to the high temperatures and the building’s instability, according to Vladimir Chernov, Kemerovo’s vice governor. The cinema is next to a children’s play area on the fourth floor, which was believed to be where the fire started.
The cause of the fire has yet to be determined by authorities, but the blaze underscored an appalling record of fire safety in Russia in recent years.
Four people were detained for questioning, including a tenant from the area in the shopping center where the fire is believed to have begun, as well as the head of the mall’s management company.
Chernov said the fire safety situation at the Winter Cherry Mall resembles those of other shopping centers in the region, where authorities will now conduct safety checks.
The head of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, Vladimir Puchkov, said rescuers struggled to contain and extinguish the fire as parts of the building began to destabilize. He described thick clouds of smoke and limited visibility as temperatures within the mall reached 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 degrees Fahrenheit), the RBC news outlet reported.
Chernov said the working theory behind the fire’s cause is that a child may have lit a foam ball in the play area with a cigarette lighter. Other theories put forward in the Russian press suggested that faulty electrical wiring may have ignited the blaze. There were reports that the building’s fire alarms did not sound, leaving those in the movie theater initially unaware of the situation.
The fire raged for hours before firefighters could reach the fourth floor of the mall. In addition to theaters and a children’s area, that floor featured a large petting zoo. All the animals are reported to have died.
The fire in Kemerovo was the latest in a string of major fire disasters in Russia in recent years. In 2003, a fire in student dorm at a Moscow university killed 44 and injured 156. In a 2007 nursing home fire in Krasnodar, 63 people died, and a 2009 nightclub fire in Perm killed 153. In 2015, a fire at a mall in Kazan took the lives of 19 people and injured 61.
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