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Russian investigators blamed management negligence for a blaze at a provincial night-club that killed 110 people as relatives gathered at a central morgue on Sunday to identify the charred remains of loved ones.
Eyewitnesses said sparks from fireworks set fire to wicker coverings on the walls and ceiling of the packed club on Friday, and that a stampede broke out as more than 200 guests rushed towards a single narrow exit.
An initial investigation found the club was not equipped with automatic fire extinguishers and that fireworks should not have been used there, Marina Zabbarova, head of the Russian Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee for Perm region, said.
"When will this complacency end?" Zabbarova asked at a news conference in Perm, an industrial city 1,150 km (720 miles) north-east of Moscow. "It was impossible to save anyone there." Four people have been arrested, including the night-club's management and the director of the company that supplied the fireworks, Zabbarova said.
Roughly three dozen locals stood in the snow outside the morgue on Sunday, while a small crowd laid red carnations and lit candles in front of the gutted Lame Horse night-club. "The authorities are directly to blame, along with corruption and the criminality of the firemen," 51-year old Leonid Ryabov said while buying flowers near the club. "They have been carrying out inspections for eight years..."
In addition to the dead, roughly 130 people are suffering from smoke inhalation and extensive burns. About 80 of the victims have been flown to hospitals in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Chelyabinsk.
"It was monstrous, young people died there, the future of Russia," said Sergei Prokofiev, an 18 year-old student and a stepbrother of one of the victims. An all-day memorial service was also under way at the Holy Trinity cathedral in Perm. Flags were flying at half mast in the city, and President Dmitry Medvedev has declared Monday a national day of morning.
Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee told the Itar-Tass news agency that prosecutors planned to charge the four suspects with causing reckless death by violating fire safety standards.
"This is not a premeditated murder, but this does not lessen the gravity of the crime," Medvedev said on Saturday. Friday's fire was Russia's deadliest in decades, emergency officials said, and the worst night-club fire world-wide since nearly 200 people died at a party in Buenos Aires in 2004.

Copyright Reuters, 2009

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