You're reading: RFE/RL: Kemerovo fire – ‘They didn’t open the fire exit. Was there one?’

RFE/RL: Kemerovo fire – ‘They didn’t open the fire exit. Was there one?’

Published March 27, 2018. Updated March 27 at 10:19 am

An aerial view taken on March 25, 2018 with a drone shows a fire of the shopping centre in Kemerovo. A total of 64 people, many of them children, perished in a fire that ravaged a busy shopping mall in an industrial city in Siberia, officials said on March 26, 2018 as rescuers searched through piles of charred rubble to recover bodies. Russian television showed images of thick black smoke pouring out of the roof of the Winter Cherry shopping centre in the city of Kemerovo, which also houses a sauna, a bowling alley and a multiplex cinema and was packed with people on Sunday afternoon.

Photo by AFP

Milana Tatarchukova was heading to a birthday party at the Zimnyaya Vishnya shopping center when she saw the thick black smoke.

Amid the chaos that ensued as mall patrons tried to escape the March 25 fire that left at least 64 people dead in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, one image stands out.