A fire at a shopping centre in the Siberian city of Kemerovo has left at least 64 people dead, many of them children, in one of the country’s deadliest blazes in nearly a decade.
Russian emergency workers on Monday scrambled to reach several people still trapped in the rubble of the smouldering Winter Cherry shopping.
The fire broke out on a busy Sunday afternoon and quickly engulfed the top floor of the building, spreading through a children’s ice-skating rink, play centre and a two-screen cinema.
Images from the scene showed thick black smoke pouring from the roof and windows of the white-and-yellow panel shopping centre, as firefighters continued to battle the flames after nightfall from four storeys up.
A Kremlin spokesman on Monday said that Vladimir Putin had been informed of the fire and “offered condolences to the relatives and loved ones of those killed.”
As of Monday evening, Putin had not publicly addressed the fire, the deadliest since a club in the Siberian city of Perm burned down in 2009, killing 156.
News reports on state-run television Monday said that young children at the shopping mall had called relatives from the burning shopping centre.
“Tell my mother that I loved her,”one young girl told her aunt, according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. “”Tell everyone that I loved them.”
“We are burning,” another young woman wrote on the VK social network. “This may be goodbye.”
It is still unclear what sparked the fire, which was put out on Sunday evening. Authorities on Monday said four arrests had been made in connection with the fire.
The section of the shopping centre housing the cinema screens collapsed during the fire, Russia’s emergencies ministry reported on Monday.
“This shopping centre on several floors was packed with people mid-day Sunday. No one knows exactly how many people there were inside when the fire broke out,” Alexandre Eremeyev, an official with the local Russian emergency services ministry, said in a statement.
“Where to look for people? How many are there? That has greatly complicated the work of the firefighters,” he said, according to Reuters.
Witnesses have told several Russian news agencies that fire alarms at the shopping centre did not go off despite thick smoke filling the top floor, and that the rush of people trying to escape the fire turned into a stampede. Reports later said that the emergency exits to the shopping centre were locked and a security guard had switched off the fire alarm when it activated.
Investigators said they had opened several criminal investigations into the fire for negligence leading to the deaths of two or more people and for fire safety violations.
The death toll on Sunday was one of the worst in a single day from a fire in Russia in the past decade. A 2009 fire in the Lame Horse disco in the Siberian city of Perm left 156 people dead, while 38 died in 2013 in a fire at a psychiatric hospital in Ramensky, a village near Moscow.