THE funerals of some of the victims of the shopping mall fire in Russia which killed 64 people, many of them children, have taken place in the Siberian city of Kemerovo.
The city of half a million people, 1900 miles east of Moscow, is paralysed by grief over the fire last Sunday that engulfed the mall, killing dozens, including some locked inside a cinema.
While families were burying their loved ones, local residents in another part of the city were taking flowers to a makeshift memorial.
The deadly fire caused an outpouring of grief and indignation against local authorities. The Kemerovo governor never visited the site of the fire, while President Vladimir Putin did not announce a period of national mourning until days afterwards. Many locals mistrust the investigators and fear authorities might be hiding the real scale of the disaster.
“We still don’t know what really happened, and no-one takes the responsibility,” said 37-year-old nurse Valentina Skripchenko, who brought three roses to the makeshift memorial outside the mall.
Tatyana Stupel, whose neighbour’s daughter died at the mall, had a poster she placed at the memorial along with flowers taken away by an unknown individual in plain clothes. She said she had written “No-one takes the responsibility” on a piece of paper because locals “didn’t get the answers” about what happened.
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