January 14, 2009	Wednesday	Muharram 16, 1430

MOSCOW/ NAZRAN, Jan 13: Seven people died in a Moscow fire on Tuesday while an explosion in the southern Russian region of Ingushetia killed eight people and injured 22 another.

The fire tore through an underground garage that was being used to house construction workers, Russia’s emergencies ministry said.

Local news agencies said all the victims were citizens of Tajikistan, a Central Asian state with a large population of migrant workers in Moscow.

“Seven bodies were found in the garage,” the ministry said in a statement. “Twenty people were rescued from the fire and two were hospitalized.”

A spokeswoman for the ministry said none of the bodies had been identified. She confirmed that the owners of the building had permission to house workers in the garage during construction work.

Walls built of flammable material were used in the basement in “crude violation of fire safety rules”, the ministry statement said.

BLAST: An official from the Ingush prosecutor’s office said a gas leak was the likely cause of the blast, but added that this had yet to be confirmed.

“The total number of people recovered from under the rubble is 30, eight of them dead,” a spokeswoman for the regional emergency services ministry said in Nazran.

Seventeen people were rushed to hospital, while others with mild injuries were allowed to go home, officials said.

Mainly Muslim Ingushetia is adjacent to Chechnya in the North Caucasus where Russian security forces have been fighting a growing rebel insurgency.

At the blast site, rescue workers picked over the ruins of the destroyed bailiffs’ offices while relatives of those trapped under the rubble stood in the snow and wept as they watched the rescue operation.

“It was a very strong explosion. I was in the yard,” one worker shouted as he pulled away the concrete.

Rebels in Ingushetia attack police checkpoints and offices with bombs and machinegun fire and analysts say increasing violence could undermine regional stability.—Reuters