Daria Korovina, a spokeswoman for the regional
Emergencies Ministry, said two others were injured in the fire at the facility
in Vishny Volochek, 200 km north of Moscow. Some 480 people had to be
evacuated, she said.
The prosecutor-general's Investigative Committee,
Russia's top investigative body, said a preliminary inspection showed that the
nursing home resident committed suicide by self-immolation, starting a blaze
that killed eight others in neighboring rooms from smoke and gas inhalation.
The state news agency ITAR-Tass reported the man was
believed to be upset because he could not get an apartment of his own under a
program for World War II veterans.
Russia records nearly 18,000 fire deaths a year, several
times the per-capita rate in the United States and other Western countries. The
country suffers frequent fires at hospitals, schools and other state-run
facilities, with many blamed on negligence and violations of fire safety rules.
The fires have served as grim reminders of Russia's crumbling infrastructure.
In this case, however, the head of the Emergencies
Ministry's supervision department, Yuri Deshevykh, was quoted by ITAR-Tass as
saying the nursing home's fire-alarm system, installed this year, had
functioned properly. The Investigative Committee said the seven-story brick
building was built in 1988.
Also Monday, a fire of uncertain cause broke out in a
halfway-house complex for the mentally ill in the Ulyanovsk region, 500 km
southeast of Moscow, but there were no injuries, the Interfax news agency
reported.
