A 23-year-old woman has been arrested in connection with a deadly fire at a children’s camp in Odesa Oblast, even though it occurred weeks after she stopped working there.
The woman, Natalya Yanchik, who had been due to get married on Sept. 22, was arrested on Sept. 18, Ukrainian media have reported.
Fire swept through a dormitory at the Viktoria camp for orphans, children in state care and veterans’ children on the night of Sept. 15. Three children died in the blaze, and another two were hospitalized. The dormitory housed 42 of the 150 children staying at the camp at the time.
Yanchik’s lawyer, Oleksiy Cherny, told internet news website Ukrainska Pravda on Sept. 23 that his client had officially stopped working at the camp on Aug. 24, three weeks before the fatal fire.
Yanchik was arrested for two months, without the right to bail.
Yanchik is under investigation for breaching fire safety rules at the camp, as is the camp’s director, Petros Sarkisyan. The two are being investigated under Part 2, Article 270 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which covers violation of fire safety rules resulting in fatalities.
In January, Yanchik signed an employment contract and was put in charge of fire safety and fire evacuations at the camp’s buildings, although she wasn’t given any instruction and did not have the required training, her lawyer Cherny told Ukrainska Pravda.
Sarkisyan, in comments broadcast on Ukrainian media, denied he or Yanchik were responsible for the fire.
“Yes, there really was a tragedy, but we are not the ones to carry the blame for it,” said Sarkisyan. “We did everything properly, and I’m not even responsible for Viktoria’s accounts – our superiors are.”
According to witnesses, late in the evening of Sept. 15 the children at the Viktoria camp were awoken when smoke started to fill their dormitory. Camp workers rushed to get the children to safety, some of them suffering serious injuries in the process. Several of the children had to jump out of the windows of the burning building in order to save their lives.
Firefighters attending the blaze found there were no emergency fire hydrants on the territory of the children’s camp. Firefighters eventually found a water supply some 1,200 meters from the camp, but by that time the fire had spread to other buildings in the camp.
The camp was completely destroyed, and the heat from the blaze also damaged balconies on nearby residential buildings.
The State Emergency Service said that because of the wind, the fire spread rapidly though the flammable wooden structures of the camp, and neighboring buildings had also been threatened.
After the fire, Vice Prime-Minister of Ukraine Hennadiy Zubko ordered fire departments to check all children’s camps in the country, and demanded transparency in the ongoing investigation.
