Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed on Monday to bring to justice those responsible for a weekend water park tragedy that killed at least 28 people as rescuers called off their search in the freezing snow.
In a statement issued by the Kremlin, Putin expressed his condolences to the victims’ families and demanded that ”the guilty be punished” after the water park’s glass roof collapsed on Saturday evening as hundreds of bathers were frolicking below.
”The tragedy in the Moscow water park was a difficult blow for us all,” Putin said.
The owners of the Transvaal Park water sports complex frequented by Moscow’s booming middle class defended the quality of construction amid a flurry of newspaper reports suggesting that the popular attraction was shoddily built.
The final death toll from the tragedy that struck the families seemed uncertain with 17 people still unaccounted for.
Rescue workers said on Sunday that they had recovered 28 bodies.
The Moscow prosecutors’ office said 25 people were confirmed dead, including seven children.
More than 110 people were injured and 68 remained in hospital on Monday.
Moscow newspapers were scathing in their reports of the disaster.
”Who built such a water park?” the Kommersant business daily demanded in a headline.
”The most important thing is to build it quickly and sell it — nobody cares about what happens after that,” the Gazeta daily thundered in a banner headline.
Prosecutors temporarily suspended the license of the Kocak Insaat construction firm that built the sprawling pool and spa centre and launched a criminal inquiry against the company. The company’s Turkish management faces five-year prison terms if convicted of negligence.
But the Vedomosti business daily reported the complex was last year purchased indirectly by the Inteko firm, which is controlled by Yelena Boturina — the wife of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.
And several architectural experts condemned Luzhkov himself for the collapse.
”Luzhkov announced a plan in 2002 to build water parks throughout Moscow although he had not established safety controls to build these type of projects,” expert Grigory Revzin told Kommersant.
”Corruption is endemic in all Moscow construction sites, whether to obtain licences or to get permission to change one type of cement for another cheaper one,” another expert, Alexei Klimenko, told the Izvestia daily.
The Emergencies Ministry said on Monday that workers had stopped looking for survivors and were now clearing up the rubble at the site of the water park, which opened in 2002 on the southern outskirts of Moscow.
Hundreds of rescue workers had used heat-seeking equipment to shift through the mass of tangled metal, concrete, glass and icy water — all that remained of the leisure centre that was once replete with water slides and palm trees.
Russia’s Emergencies Minister Shoigu lashed out at hasty construction work in Moscow in recent years that has seen many buildings sprout up but then quickly crumble.
”It is time to do away with this nonsense. We have to get [construction work] under control,” he said.
But a spokesperson for the company that is the registered owner of Transvaal Park told Russian television that documents his firm had received when it purchased the building showed in December that it was ”guaranteed for 100 years”.
Rescuers used cranes and other heavy machinery to pull bodies out of the wreckage of the centre at the weekend.
Shoigu feared the death toll would rise and told reporters that 17 lockers in the Transvaal water park had clothes in them belonging to people who had not been located.
Desperate survivors dug themselves out of the ruins and pleaded for information about the fate of friends and loved ones they had just seen moments earlier.
”There was a very loud noise … and then there was a silence, and then everyone starting running for safety. The entire roof caved in,” one worker at the water park told Channel One television.
Hundreds of people narrowly escaped death by running out into the sub-zero temperatures naked or in swimming costumes. — Sapa-AFP