64 dead in Russian shopping mall inferno

– ‘Where to look for people?’ –

Around 120 people had been evacuated from the burning centre, rescuers said on Sunday.

“This shopping centre on several floors was packed with people midday Sunday. No one knows exactly how many people there were inside when the fire broke out,” Alexander Yeremeyev, 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, adding that the thick smoke was also hindering their task.

Some 300 firefighters and rescue personnel were rushed to the scene and the fire was brought under control late in the night, local emergency officials said.

It was the deadliest blaze in Russia in recent years.

A shopping mall fire in March 2015 killed 11 people in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan some 800 kilometres (500 miles) east of Moscow.

In April 2013, a fire ravaged a psychiatric hospital in the Moscow region, killing 38 people, most of them patients who were engulfed by flames as they slept behind barred windows.

Just months later, in September 2013, 37 people were killed when a fire swept through a psychiatric hospital in the village of Luka in northwest Russia.

In 2009, 156 were killed in a nightclub fire in the city of Perm, 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow in one of the deadliest accidents in Russia’s modern history.