RUSSIA: At least 36 people died and up to 200 were injured yesterday when fire engulfed a Moscow hostel for foreign students, killing many in their beds and forcing others to leap for their lives from the burning building.
Russian authorities said a short circuit had probably caused the blaze, but African and Asian students at the University of Peoples' Friendship said they suspected arson by far-right groups which had threatened to raze the dormitories.
They also criticised emergency services for taking about an hour to reach the hostel in south-west Moscow, saying victims died of shock and injuries while waiting for ambulances to arrive. Sixteen Chinese students were thought to be among the dead from many countries.
"We were sleeping but heard people shouting 'Fire, fire!' so we ran outside, but the smoke was so thick it was hard to breathe," said Mr John Brino, a student from Congo.
"People were throwing themselves from the windows, and there were dead and injured people in the snow. They broke their bones on the ground." Moscow mayor Mr Yuri Luzhkov said a criminal investigation had been launched into the fire, which began about 2.30 a.m. and took three hours to put out.
"According to preliminary information which we are now processing the cause of the fire was domestic, and it began on the second floor, in room 203, when something short-circuited," he said.
But many students at the university, which was established in 1960 to give people from the developing world a subsidised socialist education, said they suspected foul play from Russian nationalists who regularly hound them on the street.
"Why did this building burn, and not one with Russians in nearby?" said Afghan student Mustafa outside the charred shell of the dormitory.
"Three times skinheads have said they will bomb the building and now there is this fire. No one helps us, but we are supposed to believe this was just an accident."
Husseini, another Afghan, said the students who died had come to Russia only recently and were in a kind of quarantine block which other students were not allowed to enter until the new arrivals were declared fit and well.
Mr Sergei Tsoi, press secretary for Mayor Luzhkov, said firemen had trouble reaching the source of the blaze because the corridors and rooms of the hostel were blocked with bags and boxes of belongings.
"It was like a pig sty in there," he told Russia's Interfax news agency.
The University of Peoples' Friendship - originally named after Patrice Lumumba, Congo's independence leader - still attracts hundreds of students from Africa, Asia and Latin America a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most receive stipends of about $60 a month from their governments to study in Moscow.
More than 200 people were in the hostel when the fire began, and students said the dead and injured included citizens of at least half a dozen countries, from as far afield as China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Tahiti, Afghanistan, Angola and Vietnam.
Officials from several embassies surveyed the smouldering building yesterday as investigators from the Emergencies Ministry got to work inside, moving through the blackened wreckage in their white boiler suits.
Chinese President Hu Jintao expressed "extreme concern" over the blaze and Premier Wen Jiabao extended his "dearest sympathies" to families of the victims, Beijing's foreign ministry said in a statement.
The onset of the Russian winter often sparks a rise in fire deaths, as unused and often faulty heaters are turned on again, and the country has a very poor fire safety record. Some 18,000 Russians die in fires each year, compared with 600 in Britain.
Mr Brino, who has been in Russia for four years studying international law, said conditions in the dormitories were poor and getting worse, just like relations with young Russians who he said often abuse and attack them in the street, on the metro and in cafes. "I hate going out here, it's too dangerous. This country just doesn't respect us, it's horrible."
Afghan student Mustafa pointed out that Russian students were housed in separate dormitories. "This is the University of Peoples' Friendship, but we can't even live together," he said.