Thirty-two mainly Asian and African foreign students died on Monday in a fire that ripped through a university hostel in Moscow, reportedly the Russian capital’s most deadly blaze for a decade, police said.
Another 139 were hospitalised, of which 50 were in a critical condition, medical sources were quoted as saying by NTV television.
Many suffered broken limbs after jumping out of the five-storey building to escape the raging inferno. A criminal inquiry was launched and investigations were still
going on to determine the causes of the fire, but it may have been started intentionally, officials said.
The two main leads followed by investigators were ”intentional arson or mishandling of electric appliances,” Russian Education Minister Vladimir Filippov told the ITAR-TASS news agency.
The blaze broke out at 2:30 am (2330 GMT) and engulfed a hostel of Moscow’s Peoples’ Friendship University, in the southwest of the capital, and was only extinguished some three hours later.
Russian television showed a roaring red blaze and dense black smoke rising up from the hostel as 40 teams of firefighters struggled to douse the flames under a violent snowstorm.
As dawn broke, all that was left of the student accomodation, where more than 270 people had been at the time of the fire, was a blackened ruin with shattered windows.
”We found 28 bodies inside the building, another three were in front of the hotel and one more person died in an ambulance,” Moscow police spokesperson Kirill Mazurin told the RIA Novosti news agency.
Some of the students suffered burns and were poisoned by carbon monoxide, while others were injured leaping from the windows to escape the flames, in some cases breaking their limbs or sustaining injuries to their heads and spines, rescuers told Interfax.
Three young women from Congo, almost hysterical from anxiety, were among a crowd of students waiting outside the hostel for news of missing friends as firemen searched inside the charred interior for more bodies.
”We haven’t heard anything from our friend, who is 19 years old, Mavungu Princilia Ines,” said one of them, who refused to give her name. Four Congolese were in hospital, the young woman said.
Asked about the reasons for the fire, another one said: ”In any case, we’ll never know the truth.”
The education minister said the university administration was looking for three African students, who lived on the first floor where the fire started before spreading over to the entire building. The students were apparently seen running away shortly before.
An economic student from Peru, Adam Rosales (22) who was living on the second floor and managed to escape, said that the first firefighters took 20 minutes to arrive and the biggest fire engines an hour and a half after the blaze erupted.
”An Ecuadorean student jumped from the fifth floor and killed himself. A Brazilian jumped too and broke his arm,” Filippov said.
Casualties included nationals from Bangladesh, China, Vietnam and several African countries, a member of the union of foreign students in Moscow told Interfax without giving further details.
The Peoples’ Friendship University, formerly known as Patrice Lumumba University, was set up in Soviet times to train students from Third World countries who would then spread Soviet and Communist influence. It is still attended mostly by young people from developing countries.
Citizens from developing countries living in Russia, particularly Africans, are often subjected to racism and harassment, with sometimes fatal results. – Sapa-AFP