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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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RIYADH/SANAA (Reuters) – The Houthi movement that controls northern Yemen vowed on Monday to fire more missiles into Saudi Arabia unless it stops bombing the country, after missiles crashed into Riyadh overnight causing casualties in the Saudi capital for the first time.
Saudi forces said they shot down three missiles over Riyadh shortly before midnight. Debris fell on a home in the capital, killing an Egyptian resident and wounding two other Egyptians.
Air defenses also repelled missiles fired at the southern Saudi cities of Najran, Jizan and Khamis Mushait, Saudi-led coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said.
A top Houthi leader hailed the attack, which took place on the eve of the third anniversary of the entry into the Yemen war by Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies.
“We praise the successful advance of military capabilities,” Houthi political council chief Saleh al-Samad told a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
“If they want peace, as we have said to them before, stop your air strikes and we will stop our missiles,” he said. “If you continue your air strikes we have a right to defend ourselves by all means available.”
The war in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, which pits a coalition of Sunni Arab states friendly to the West against a Shi’ite armed movement sympathetic to Iran, has unleashed one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The Houthis control the north of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa. Saudi Arabia and its allies have been fighting on behalf of an exiled government with a foothold in the south.
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Khattab Gamal, a 27-year-old Egyptian electrician who lived in the Riyadh house hit by the debris, told Reuters he and his 15 housemates were awoken by loud explosions.
“We knew something fell on the room where Abdulmuttalib was asleep. There were three others in the same room with him. All were asleep at the time of explosion. They all rushed and ran out and then we realized he was missing.
“We kept looking for him and realized he was still inside, we went back and tried to enter the room and save him but we couldn’t,” he said by telephone. “There was a lot of dust and the smell was suffocating…. A few minutes later the civil defense came and got him out but he was already dead.”
The Saudi-led coalition has launched thousands of air strikes on Yemen in the past three years, some of which have hit hospitals, schools and markets, killing hundreds of civilians while bringing Riyadh little closer to military victory.
The kingdom has said hundreds of its own soldiers and civilians have been killed in Houthi mortar and short-range missile attacks across their rugged southern border.
The United Nations says 10,000 people have died in the conflict so far, and millions face potential famine and disease because of disruption to food and medical supplies.
Around 22 million civilians, or 75 percent of Yemen’s population, require humanitarian aid, according to latest U.N. data. The conflict has caused the worst cholera outbreak in modern history, with over 1 million reported cases.
Last year, when the Houthis fired missiles at Riyadh which were intercepted without doing damage, the Arab coalition responded by shutting Yemen’s airports and ports, a blockade that the United Nations said raised the prospect of mass starvation before it was partially lifted.
Western countries have urged Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies to protect civilians and find a quick end to the war. But they also support Riyadh’s argument that it needs to defend itself from cross border strikes and limit the spread of Iranian influence in territory overlooking important trade routes.
The Saudi military depends on service contracts with Western arms companies to keep its planes flying. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the war with U.S. President Donald Trump during a visit to the White House last week, and with British Prime Minister Theresa May in London the previous week.
Saudi Arabia viewed the 2014 takeover of Sanaa by the Houthis as part of a regional strategy by arch-foe Tehran to encircle it. Independent U.N. experts reported to the Security Council in January that Houthi missiles they had examined and other military equipment had been manufactured in Iran.
The Houthis deny they are Iranian pawns, and say their spread throughout Yemen is a national revolution against corrupt government officials and Gulf Arab states in thrall of the West.
Diplomats and Yemeni political officials reported this month that the Houthis and Saudi Arabia were conducting secret peace talks after years of U.N.-mediated dialogue yielded no results.
Additional reporting by Aziz El Yaakoubi; Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by Ghaida Ghantous and Peter Graff
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