22 people perish in a fire at a Russian nursing home

Twenty-two people have been killed in a fire at an illegal care home in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, Russia’s emergencies ministry said.

The fire broke out early on Saturday morning in the two-storey wooden building in the industrial city more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow. Initial reports say it may have been caused by a faulty boiler.

Russian officials said the private facility for older people was operating illegally.

“We were sleeping when the house caught fire,” a resident of the nursing home told Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to the police. “Those who had time ran out of the building, and the rest of the people suffocated and burned.”

Fires are common at private Russian care homes, which are often run out of small houses with inadequate facilities. A blaze killed 11 residents of a private care home in the city of Magnitogorsk in December 2020, and 14 people were killed in two separate care home fires in the Moscow area the same year.

Unregistered care homes are considered private property and are not subject to fire inspections, local fire service officials told the Tass news agency. The governor of the Kemerovo region, Sergey Tsivilyov, instructed the emergency services to inspect all unregistered care homes in the city after the latest fire.

Local media reported that an evangelical pastor, who was believed to be running the nursing home, had been detained for questioning.

Saturday’s blaze is the second major fire in Kemerovo in the past five years. A fire at a shopping centre killed 64 people, many of them children, in 2018.