President Dmitry Medvedev indicated Tuesday that heads might roll in the federal government over a weekend fire that killed at least 118 people in a Perm nightclub.
Medvedev spoke hours after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the nightclub and blamed local officials for the tragedy.
The fire started when sparks from a pyrotechnics show ignited artificial branches on the ceiling of the Khromaya Loshad (Lame Horse) nightclub early Saturday, causing hundreds of people celebrating the club’s eighth anniversary to stampede toward the single exit.
Five more people died of their injuries Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 118, and 116 remained hospitalized in Perm, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Chelyabinsk.
Medvedev ordered Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to find and prosecute officials on all levels of the government for the blaze.
"You have to investigate the role of government structures, including the federal ones," Medvedev said. "If their orders are ignored, then … they are ineffective."
Medvedev also questioned the wisdom of lighting pyrotechnics in a building and said carelessness had become a "national threat."
"A great deal of emergencies, including road accidents and deadly fires, happen because of our carelessness, which has become a national threat," Medvedev said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Putin flew to Perm late Monday and told regional officials to examine the "inaction" of inspectors on the district, city and regional levels who had failed to check whether all fire safety violations had been eliminated.
"This kind of approach to the issue can't be qualified as anything but negligence at the minimum," Putin said, according to a transcript on the government's web site.
Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu has suspended the Perm region's top fire official, Vladimir Mukhutdinov, and six of his subordinates, including his deputies and department heads, Emergency Situations Ministry official Yury Deshovykh told reporters.
Mukhutdinov was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack, a senior regional official, Igor Orlov, told Interfax.
Orlov also said the nightclub had room for 50 people, while about 300 had attended the weekend festivities.
Perm Governor Oleg Chirkunov has suspended the head of the Perm municipal district where the nightclub is located, Ivan Voronov, and the regional official responsible for the technical state of buildings, Tatyana Magzumova, according to his region's web site, Perm.ru.
Chaika told Medvedev that the building used by the nightclub was owned by the Defense Ministry and that the Prosecutor General's Office would investigate whether the ministry had leased the premises to the nightclub legally, Interfax reported.
Four suspects have been arrested in connection with the fire, including the nightclub's owner, two senior staff members and the head of the company that supplied the pyrotechnics for the show.
Meanwhile, a Perm resident who shares the same first and last names as one of the suspects expressed fear for her life Tuesday after a local television channel used her picture in a news report.
The picture of Svetlana Yefremova, who has the same name as the nightclub's managing director, was probably taken from her page on the social networking web site Odnoklassniki.ru, her husband, Konstantin Karavayev, told Interfax.
The husband said he had read posts in Internet forums where bloggers had "threatened to tear apart" the nightclub's managing director.
Federal and regional officials will jointly provide 500,000 rubles ($15,580) in compensation to families of those killed in the fire and 400,000 rubles ($13,270) to the injured, Putin said.
• A fire broke out Tuesday afternoon at a nightclub in the southern city of Krasnodar, a spokeswoman for the regional branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry told RIA-Novosti.
No one was injured in the fire, which covered an area of 100 square meters and was put out in less than two hours. The cause of the fire was under investigation.