Eleven die in Siberia

MOSCOW: Eleven people including 10 from Uzbekistan died when a fire ripped through a wooden shack in a remote Siberian village on Tuesday, in the latest tragedy involving migrant workers in Russia.

Millions of migrant workers from Central Asia live in Russia, where they often perform menial jobs for low pay under lax safety conditions. Regional authorities said that in the early hours of Tuesday the fire raced through a shack on the grounds of a private saw mill in the Prichulymsky settlement in the Tomsk region of western Siberia. The shack was “unfit for habitation”, regional authorities said.

“People were living in a structure that was not intended for it, and which also had barred windows,” said regional governor Sergei Zhvachkin, who visited the scene. “Investigators will establish the cause of the blaze and the guilty will be punished,” he said in remarks released by his office. Images released by investigators showed firefighters combing through the burned shell of the shack in a snow-covered field.