Third victim's body found in Moscow tower fire

Third victim's body found in Moscow tower fire
REUTERS

MOSCOW, AUG 29: Russian rescuers on Tuesday identified a third victim in the fire that gutted the landmark Ostankino television tower, one of the tallest buildings on Earth.

The fire, which broke out on Sunday, sent clouds of smoke over the Moscow skyline for a night and a day, and blacked out TV sets for most of the city's 10 million residents. Officials were due to re-enter the building later on Tuesday to assess the damage.

Rescue workers pulled the third body out of a lift that had crashed into the waterlogged basement of the 540-metre (1772-foot) landmark tower, an Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman said. Two others had been found there late on Monday.

It was not clear whether that would be the final death toll. Fire fighters had earlier said up to four people were missing. The lift cabin where the bodies were found was crushed under a counterweight, making it difficult to recover the bodies.

Two of the three people confirmed killed were civilian employees at the tower - a plumber and an elevator operator - apparently pressed into assisting fire fighters long after the tower had been evacuated. The third was a senior fire fighter.

Officials have acknowledged that using the elevator after the fire broke out was a violation of normal procedure, but they seem to have had no other means to lift equipment and men hundreds of metres into the sky to battle the blaze.

Information Minister Mikhail Lesin has vowed to restore television broadcasts in the capital within a week, but has not said how this will be done.

Russians are hard-core television addicts, spending more than 20 hours a week in front of sets watching mostly news programmes, grisly true-crime cop shows and dubbed Latin American soap operas.

Advertising agencies said they stand to lose millions, and the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets

warned of a wave of violent crime if broadcasts do not resume quickly.

"The absence of such an irresistible narcotic as television will certainly cause a rise in the sort of senseless crimes usually carried out when there is nothing else to do," it said.

"Boredom sets in. So you rob a bystander, knife the neighbour or bash in the windows of a nearby shop."

The Ostankino tower was completed in 1967 and heralded as a triumph of Soviet engineering. It lost its mantle as the world's tallest free-standing structure when Toronto's CN Tower, at 553 metres (1,815 feet), was built nine years later.