Kemerovo fire: thousands protest in Russia over mishandling of disaster

Anger over the deadly fire in a shopping mall in Kemerovo spilled on to the streets of the Siberian city on Tuesday as thousands of people joined a rally to protest over official mishandling of the disaster.

President Vladimir Putin arrived in Kemerovo earlier in the day and blamed “criminal negligence” and “sloppiness” for the blaze at the Winter Cherry shopping mall and recreation on Sunday.

At least 64 people, including 41 children, were killed in the fire. However, there are widespread suspicions in Kemerovo that the authorities are covering up the full extent of the tragedy and the real death toll is much higher.

Mr Putin, who faces a major diplomatic crisis over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in the UK, flew to Kemerovo, a coal mining town 3,612km from Moscow on Tuesday to chair a meeting of regional officials to discuss the fallout from the fire. Arriving in the city early in the morning, the Russian president went straight to Winter Cherry where he laid flowers at a makeshift memorial outside the stricken mall.

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Alexander Bastrykin, the chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee, told Mr Putin that the evacuation of Winter Cherry had been badly organised. Fire escapes at the mall were blocked and emergency alarms failed to sound. One reason for the high death count was that a children’s playroom and cinema halls on the fourth floor had been locked, leaving visitors trapped in the inferno when the fire broke out.

Emotional rally

Thousands of people joined an emotional rally in a square in the centre of Kemerovo on Tuesday demanding a transparent investigation of the fire and the resignation of the regional governor, Aman Tuleyev, and local city officials. They carried banners saying “Truth” and “Where is Tuleyev?”and chanted “murderers, murderers”.

The tragedy in Kemerovo has cast a shadow over Mr Putin’s victory in the Russian election last week, in which he won a fourth presidential term with a record 76.7 per cent of the vote.

In Kemerovo region, where the pro-Kremlin Mr Tuleyev has crushed all dissent during the two decades he has served as governor, more than 85 per cent of voters supported Mr Putin in the March 18th poll.

Asked by people in Kemerovo on Tuesday if he would sack Mr Tuleyev, Mr Putin said it was neither the time nor the place to announce such a move. “We need to establish exactly who is to blame for what. And when we have done this – and we will definitely do it – there will be a related decision.”

Russia would inevitably see more deadly fires unless the Kremlin moved to uproot official corruption and instill greater respect for human life, said Andrei Okara, a political scientist who heads the Centre for East European Research. The power vertical system Mr Putin has built “protects the Russian elite rather than the people”, he told a seminar at the Rosbalt news agency in Moscow on Tuesday.