You're reading: Probe reveals new evidence in case of Odesa camp fire, signs of corruption

A new investigation by independent experts and Slidstvo.Info, an investigative journalism project, has uncovered new evidence in the case of a tragic fire at a summer camp in Odesa on Sept. 16, 2017, in which three young girls died.

In a documentary aired on Ukrainian television on Sept. 13, Slidstvo.Info showed that the official investigation had missed important evidence, such as the fact that the camp’s wooden buildings had been constructed without the use of fire-retardant materials.

“When the fire broke out on the first floor, such materials would prevent it from spreading quickly to the second floor, and children would have had at least 45 minutes to evacuate,” an expert in fire safety in construction said in the documentary. “They basically built bonfires for children.”

Another expert, who studied the construction plans for the camp, said that such buildings should not be higher than one floor.

Although the experts are not to give their final conclusions until the end of this year, their preliminary findings raise more questions: Who was responsible for construction and the following fire safety inspection? Who commissioned unsafe buildings and allowed to accommodate children in them?

In the burnt ruins of the camp building, independent experts also recovered some remains of the victims and a water heating rod, meaning that state investigators had not examined the site thoroughly.

However, in an interview with Slidstvo.Info, Odesa Police Chief Dmitry Golovin said that the new evidence wouldn’t be taken into account until DNA tests proved that the remains belonged to the victims.

Parents’ struggle  

The Viktoria summer camp on the Black Sea coast opened with a fanfare in May 2017. President Petro Poroshenko and Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov triumphantly inaugurated the site, boasting of its modern facilities with everything necessary for a comfortable vacation for children.

But three-and-a-half months later a fire broke out in one of the camp’s wooden houses. Roommates Sonya Mazur, Snizhana Arpentiy, and Nastya Kulinich – all 8 years old – died in the fire on the night of Sept. 16, 2017.

The official investigation concluded that the blaze had been started by a water heating rod that someone had forgotten to unplug in one of the rooms. The children’s supervisor at the camp received a suspended three-year sentence. The director of the camp is still on trial.

However, the parents of the dead girls later demanded the exhumation of bodies for forensic tests since some body fragments were missing. In addition, the authorities refused to recognize parents of the girls as victims of a crime.

There were many other unanswered questions. Why the house burn so quickly? It took half an hour for a 500-square-meter, two-floor building to burn to ashes. Who built it and who oversaw the quality and safety? Why didn’t the fire alarm go off? Why were there no fire hydrants on the site?

Several months after the tragedy, Oleksiy Mazur, the father of one of the victims, Sonya Mazur, managed to get court’s permission to carry an independent examination of the fire site and hired a group of Ukrainian and foreign experts.

Reporters from the Slidstvo.Info investigative project Yevheniia Motorevska and Kateryna Likhglyad followed the examination while investigating the case on their own.

Independent experts found a second water heating element overlooked by the state investigators at the fire site in Odesa summer camp Viktoria that killed three children on Sept. 16, 2017. This screenshot was taken from a documentary film by Slidstvo.Info, which premiered on Sept. 13, 2018. (Source: Slidstvo.Info)

City authorities’ responsibility

Slidstvo.Info reporters also looked into the origins of the Viktoria summer camp. They found that a member of the Odesa City Council, Borys Panov, commissioned the construction, while his colleague Oleksandr Avdeyev issued a permit to build and accepted the houses into service the next day. The camp was built by a local construction company called Monolit. Then Mayor Hennady Trukhanov gave the order to start accepting children to stay at the camp.

The city administration spent Hr 46 million ($1.7 million) on the construction of the camp. The journalists discovered that most of that money, Hr 20 million (over $700,000), went to one company that then transferred it to four fictitious firms. Those fake firms had provided services for other projects of Odesa city administration in the past and have figured in several criminal investigations.

“We wanted to show the blind spots in the official investigation, which didn’t look into the construction of the camp and possible embezzlement, which led to the tragedy,” said Kateryna Likhoglyad, one the makers of the documentary.