Jun 21, 2007, 17:31 GMT
Moscow - An unextinguished cigarette caused a fire that claimed the lives of 10 people at a nursing home near the Russian city of Omsk, emergency officials said Thursday.
'An unextinguished cigarette was the cause of the fire,' Alexander Glazunov, a regional Emergency Situations Ministry official, told the local television station Channel 12, Interfax reported.
The fire killed 10 late Wednesday and left four hospitalized, the latest in a string of tragic fires at Russian nursing homes and other healthcare wards in the last year.
Officials additionally said a late call to firefighters by watchmen at the home contributed to the deaths. Fire brigades arrived within five minutes of receiving word of the blaze.
After six hours of battling the flames, the fire was put out at 2:45 a.m., officials said.
A criminal case was opened into neglect. Fire authorities told Interfax that while 12 fire-safety violations had been revealed at the home last December and March, all but two had been fixed and the remaining violations were 'insignificant.'
The blaze began in a third-floor hall where residents were watching television, Glazunov said. Because residents had received their pensions the night before, he added, 'many were in a state of alcoholic intoxication.'
All of those who died were men born between 1932 and 1955, meaning the youngest victims were to turn 52 in 2007. Russia's official retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women.
Russia has been plagued by tragic fires with large death tolls in all sorts of institutionalized homes, often due to insufficient safety precautions.
Five people died last month in a fire at a psychiatric ward in the southern Rostov region and nine died in a psychiatric ward in Siberia's Kemerovo region in December.
That month also saw 45 perish in a blaze at a Moscow drug-rehabilitation centre. And in March, more than 60 residents of a nursing home in southern Russia died in a fire. Most of the victims were bed-ridden.
According to emergency services statistics, 4,977 people died in fires in the first quarter of this year, an average of nearly 55 per day.
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