Angry voices
Thousands of distraught Russians rally in Kemerovo to demand a full probe into a shopping mall fire.
MOSCOW: Thousands of angry and distraught Russians rallied in a Siberian city to demand a full probe into a shopping mall fire that killed at least 64 people, many of them children.
President Vladimir Putin, who also visited the city, blamed the deaths on “a criminal negligence, sloppiness”, as he laid flowers in tribute to the victims. He did not address the rally.
The blaze engulfed the Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo on Sunday, the first weekend of the school recess, trapping dozens of parents and children inside.
Eyewitnesses reported that fire alarms were silent and many doors were locked.
Some of the victims were children who died in a locked movie theatre.
The angry residents rallied outside the regional government building in Kemerovo for hours, with many of the protesters taking the stage to accuse the authorities of hiding the real scale of the disaster.
One protester, Igor Vostrikov, addressed deputy governor Sergei Tsivilyov, saying that families of the victims think the death toll is much higher than stated because the entire movie theatre burnt down.
“We’re not calling for blood,” he said at the rally. “The children are dead, you can’t give them back. We need justice.”
When the deputy governor dismissed the protester’s call as “a PR stunt”, Vostrikov said he has lost his wife, sister and three daughters, aged two, five and seven, in the fire.
“They died because they were locked in a movie theatre,” Vostrikov said in an interview on the Dozhd television station.
“They were calling from there, asking for help: ‘ We’re locked in, we’re suffocating.’ No one helped because when the blaze broke out, everyone ran away.”
The impromptu protest under- scored the residents’ frustration with the official response to the tragedy: the local governor has not visited the site of the fire or met with the relatives.
Putin flew to Kemerovo earlier yesterday and visited the makeshift memorial to the victims outside the shopping mall.
“How could this possibly happen?
“What’s the reason?” Putin said at a meeting with the task force dealing with the fire, according to comments distributed by his press office.
Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleyev, meeting Putin, blamed “the opposition” and “local busybodies” for fomenting the protests, and claimed that families of the victims were not at the rally.