Nursing home fire adds to Russia's disaster death toll

The Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a "painstaking" investigation after a series of accidents across Russia claimed at least 174 lives within four days. On Saturday, a passenger airliner crash landed at Samara airport in central Russia killing six people; on Monday an explosion ripped through a Siberian coal mine killing at least 106; and yesterday a fire at a nursing home in southern Russia claimed 62 victims.

In all three cases there were suggestions of serious human error. "You have to do your best to investigate the reasons at the highest level ... and to draw corresponding conclusions," Mr Putin told the Prime Minister, Mikhail Fradkov.

The mining accident, in the Siberian region of Kemerovo at the Ulyanovskaya mine 2,000 miles east of Moscow, was the deadliest accident of its kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is thought to have been caused by a powerful explosion of methane gas that brought down the mine's roof at a time when 203 people were almost 1,000ft underground. Shafts flooded, toxic smoke filled the air, and many miners were buried alive.

Though his body has yet to be officially identified, several Russian officials have named a 56-year-old British mining consultant, Ian Robertson, as among the dead. Mr Robertson, from Humberside, employed by a company owned by Leeds-based White Young Green Plc, was evaluating the mine's reserves of coal, according to colleagues in Moscow. Early reports suggest he was invited to witness a demonstration of the mine's new hazard warning system along with the facility's senior management, all of whom died in the blast.

Russian officials have been quoted as saying that the new safety system was manufactured by a UK-based company; Mr Robertson's company does not manufacture such equipment. Federal investigators speculated that the accident resulted from sudden subsoil movements or that the mine, which only entered into service in 2002, had a fatal design flaw.

But local prosecutors said they suspected human error. "The main theory being considered by the prosecutor's office is violations of mining work rules," the Kemerovo regional prosecutor Alexei Bugayets told the Interfax news agency. Four miners were unaccounted for last night as the authorities dispatched divers into the mine to search for survivors.

As Russians struggled to digest one tragedy, they were confronted with another as a fire at a nursing home in southern Russia killed 62. The fire, in the village of Kamyshevatskaya, in the Krasnodar region, near the Black Sea, killed elderly residents who appear to have been let down by their carers and the state.

The fire services took more than an hour to get to the scene; staff struggled to find keys to emergency exits; the home's night watchman only reacted after the fire alarm sounded for the third time, and most of the victims died from asphyxiation.

Though the village where the home is located has a school and two kindergartens, the local fire station was shut down last year; the nearest fire station is more than 30 miles away. A local resident, Pavel Babenko, told the Channel One TV station: "The fire station was closed and has been plundered. Nobody cares about anything." Investigators said that they thought the fire was either arson, the result of an electrical short circuit, or due to carelessness.

Six people died on Saturday when a Tupolev-134 passenger jet crashed at Samara airport in central Russia. Regional prosecutors claimed pilot error and bad weather was to blame.