‘This is the end,’ writes girl as Russian cinema burns
MOSCOW • At least 64 people, many believed to be children, perished in the Siberian city of Kemerovo as an engulfing fire swept through a crowded shopping centre where fire exits had been blocked.
An entire class of schoolchildren apparently died in the fire, some having had the chance to make desperate, futile phone calls to parents or relatives before succumbing to the smoke and flames.
The parents of three sisters described receiving desperate phone calls from their trapped daughters just min- utes before they died in a locked cinema.
“Our children burned while we just watched,” said Olga Lillyevyali, who rushed to the shopping centre as the fire was under way, Russian news website Meduza reported.
Her three daughters, twins aged 11 and their five-year-old sister, had been dropped off at the cinema by their father, Alexander Lillyevyali, to see children’s film Sherlock Gnomes earlier that afternoon.
When he got a phone call an hour later from one of his daughters to say she was stuck behind locked doors as the fire spread, he raced upstairs.
Cinemas in Russia often lock doors during the screening to stop people entering without a ticket.
“I started to crawl but I realized I had no strength,” Mr. Lillyevyali said.
“I had inhaled so much smoke that I was on the verge of fainting. My daughter was ringing and ringing me. I could only shout down the phone that she should try and get out of the cinema but I couldn’t do anything — there were flames in front of me.”
A litany of fire safety violations were blamed for the death toll. Investigators said fire exits were blocked and the fire alarm system was switched off by a security guard shortly after the fire broke out on Sunday.
Authorities launched a criminal investigation into the fire. Four people were arrested and questioned by police Monday, including the head of the company responsible for servicing the fire alarm system and the technical director of the company that owned the shopping centre.
It was not immediately clear how many other children had died in the blaze, but the shopping centre was full of families enjoying the first weekend of the Easter school holidays.
A young girl from the central Russian city of Kazan, Maya Yerokhina, believed to be among the victims, updated the status on her profile page on Russian social networking site Vkontakte during the fire to read: “this is the end.”
An 11-year-old boy was in intensive care after jumping from a third-floor window to escape the thick smoke during a dramatic escape caught on camera. Both his parents and a sibling were reported to have died.