Russian shopping mall fire leaves 37 dead, 69 missing
MOSCOW -- A devastating fire at a shopping center in a Siberian city killed 37 people and left 69 others missing Sunday, many of them children, a Russian state news agency reported. The Tass agency quoted firefighters as saying that 40 of the missing at the four-story Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo were children. An additional 43 people were injured in the blaze, the report said.
There has been no immediate information on the cause of the fire at the mall, which is about 1,900 miles east of Moscow. But Tass reported that the fire started on the top floor and consumed an area of about 16,150 square feet.
The reports didn't say if the victims died from burns or smoke inhalation.
The shopping mall, which opened in 2013, has a cinema, petting zoo, children's center and bowling, Tass reported.
Yevgeny Dedyukhin, deputy head of the Kemerovo region emergency department, told BBC News that 288 emergency personnel, 62 fire units and an airborne group responded to the fire.