![People lay flowers outside Lame Horse nightclub where a fire took place on Friday, in the centre of Perm, 1,150 km (720 miles) east of Moscow, December 6, 2009. [Agencies]](http://www.vinnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/clu6.jpg "clu6")
Perm, Russia – Russia’s Prosecutor General filed Monday an indictment against four people suspected of causing a giant explosion that killed 117 people in a nightclub late Friday night. One of the suspects possesses an Israeli passport.
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About 30 of the 120 hospitalized remain in critical condition after the blaze engulfed a nightclub in Perm, sparked by an indoor fireworks display. Four additional victims died Monday night.
Authorities in Russia say the fire was sparked by an electrical malfunction. The prosecution suspects negligence and has indicted the nightclub’s co-owner – the Israeli Anatoly Zak – its manager, entertainment director, and the head of a fireworks company whose show started the blaze.
A memorial ceremony was held Monday to commemorate the victims of the fire. President Dmitry Medvedev appeared angry with the club’s owners during a consultation on the incident, some of which was aired on national TV.
Medvedev said those responsible had “neither brain nor conscience”, and added that “we must think of a legislation that pertains to incidents of this kind, which must be tougher, and the responsibility for neglecting to follow fire codes must be heavier as well”.
Enforcement of fire-safety standards is infamously poor in Russia and there have been several catastrophic blazes at drug-treatment facilities, nursing homes, apartment buildings and nightclubs in recent years. In general around 18,000 people die annually in fires in the country.
Andrei Nikitin, a local journalist, told Ynet this week that owners of the club had received orders to fix certain failures within a year, but did not do so. A return inspection was scheduled to take place Monday.
Nikitin, who frequents the club, said renovations were done over the summer but that they did not improve safety conditions, and may have even worsened them. “The ceiling is made of plastic, fabric, straw, and wood,” he explained, all materials which cause a fire to spread rapidly
Oy vey zmir, why won’t these anti-semitten just leave us alone? They always have to make an example of a Yid, r”l. Take us out of this golus, Ribbono Shel Olam, and away from these shgutzim who don’t recognize the heliger neshomos of Yidden. Oh, wait — he’s an Israeli? Probably a hiloni apikores who may have even served in the army of the treife medina. Never mind. I’ll just go back to writing my new book documenting how every allegation made against any frum yid — Mondrowitz, Kolko, Rubashkin, Merkin, Bernard Bergman (remember that gadol?), Philip Drailich, and several hundred others from the past few decades alone — is absolutely false and the result of the hatred Esav has for Yakov.
It is widely known for decades that a great majority of the Russians coming to Israel were absolutely not Jewish – some claiming their Jewishness through a Jewish Grandparent and some
once married to a Jew who come along their non Jewish children from other marriages to non Jews. But its nice that we get the “credit” for them when they do bad. Today a Jewish sounding name also means very little. One of the reasons why Eliyahu HaNavi will sort all of this out. BIMHARA!!!!
Very sad. It sounds like the fire at the nightclub in Rhode Island that killed so many people a few years ago — the cause was the exact same — using fireworks/pyrotechnics indoors. It’s a shame we cant learn from other’s mistakes and tragedies.
Sadly much of the criminal mafia in Russia is of Jewish descent. Organized criminal activity was one of the ways in which alienated Jews responded to anti-Semitism during Soviet times.
The Perm area had many Soviet “labor” camps, imprisoning many thousands of Yidden. We don’t understand HKBH’s ways of mida k’neged mida, but………
I know I’ll get heat for saying this, but as far as those two israelies that died in the blaze, I feel bad not that they died in the fire but that on ‘leil shabbos kodesh’ these two jews had nothing better to do than be mechalel shabbos and sit (or stand- I wouldn’t know as I was never in one) in a night club. What a rachmonus on them…… In other words I feel bad not how they died, but how they lived.