56 killed in Russia shopping centre fire
At least 56 people have been killed as a fire ripped through a busy shopping centre in an industrial city in western Siberia.
Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said scores more have been reported missing, including children.
Images on Russian television showed thick black smoke pouring out of the Winter Cherry shopping centre in the city of Kemerovo.
It also houses a sauna, a bowling alley and a multiplex cinema and was packed with people yesterday afternoon.
The preliminary findings of the inquiry said the fire started around 12pm Irish time in one of the cinema halls and destroyed more than 1,000 square metres of the centre.
"The roof collapsed in two theatres in the cinema," the investigative committee said.
An official with the local Russian emergency services ministry said: "This shopping centre on several floors was packed with people mid-day Sunday.
"No one knows exactly how many people there were inside when the fire broke out."
"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.
Russia's minister of emergency services, Vladimir Putchkov has gone to Kemerovo, RIA Novosti 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 800km 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, 1,200km east of Moscow in one of the deadliest accidents in Russia's modern history.
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