Eight People Convicted Over Deadly Siberian Mall Fire, 30 September 2021

A court in Siberia has found a group of eight people guilty of negligence in a 2018 fire in the city of Kemerovo that killed 60 people, including 37 children.

The Zavodskoi district court on September 30 found the former director of a company that owned the Zimnyaya Vishnya (Winter Cherry) mall, Yulia Bogdanova; former mall manager Nadezhda Suddenok; the mall's former technical director, Georgy Sobolev; and the mall's former security officer, Sergei Antyushin guilty of providing unsafe services that led to the deaths to customers.

In addition, it also found the chief of a company that installed the fire-alarm system in the mall, Igor Polozinenko; his assistant, Aleksandr Nikitin; and firefighters Andrei Bursin and Sergei Genin guilty of negligence in the blaze...

It was the last in a long series of disasters caused or exacerbated by the corrosively deadly effects of negligence, carelessness, corruption, corner-cutting, and crumbling infrastructure...