Fire in old age home in Ukraine kills 17

Seventeen people died when a makeshift home for elderly people outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev caught fire in the early hours yesterday, the emergency services said

Kiev: Seventeen people died when a makeshift home for elderly people outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev caught fire in the early hours yesterday, the emergency services said.

Emergency ministry employees search the site of fire. Pic/AP

“The bodies of 17 people have been found at the site of the fire,” the head of Ukraine’s state emergency services, Mykola Chechetkin, said in a statement.

The fire tore through the temporary two-storey shelter for the elderly, which was located in village Litochky, some 50 kilometres north of Kiev. Citing preliminary information, the services said that 35 people were at the shelter when the fire broke out in the early hours yesterday.

Eighteen people have been rescued and five of them have been hospitalised, said the agency, adding that the fire had been extinguished in a few hours. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been notified of the blaze, the government said in a statement, adding that Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman had tasked officials with creating a special commission to look into the fire.

Groysman expressed condolences to the families of those who had perished in the “terrible tragedy,” the government said in a statement.

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