Fire kills 21 pupils and their teacher in Siberia

A fire engulfed an old wooden school yesterday, killing 21 students and a teacher in the Russian republic of Yakutia in northern Siberia.

Ten more students, aged between 11 and 18, were taken to hospital with burns and fractured limbs after they tried to escape the flames by jumping from the windows of the two-storey building.

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, called the fire a "major calamity" and ordered the federal government to co-operate fully with the authorities in Yakutia, about 4,800km (3,000 miles) east of Moscow. Mr Putin appeared on television instructing his ministers to "provide help to the republic and, immediately, to the families of the victims".

The fire erupted as lessons began in a rural school in the village of Sydybal, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in Moscow.

The village does not have a fire department, so fire trucks had to drive to the school from 20km away. By the time they arrived, the school, built in 1927, was engulfed in flames.

The chief prosecutor's office in Yakutia opened a criminal investigation into the fire deaths, as is common in such cases.

In rural Russian villages, most buildings are wooden and depend on heat from stoves, and sometimes safety standards are disregarded as people try to keep warm.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has racked up some of the world's grimmest fire statistics. Fifty people a day – 18,000 a year – die in fires, mostly a result of smoking or carelessness. There are 600 fire deaths a year in Britain, or one per 100,000 people – compared with 12.5 per 100,000 in Russia.