Flooded caverns and flammable gas hampered the search for workers missing after an explosion at a Siberian coal mine as Russia held a day of mourning for the 108 killed in the country’s worst mining disaster in more than a decade.

A fire has broken out in a women’s ward of a Moscow drug treatment hospital, filling the ward with heavy smoke and killing 45 women who became trapped between the fire and a locked gate, officials said.

The concave, snow-covered roof of a three-decade-old Moscow market collapsed early today, killing at least 31 people and trapping about 10.

Suicide attackers seized a packed school in Russia’s troubled Caucuses region today and threatened to kill 50 children for every gunman “destroyed".

Rescue workers with sniffer dogs picked through the ruins of an indoor water park searching for survivors in Moscow today after a roof collapsed on hundreds of bathers yesterday, killing over two dozen people.

Rescuers were today picking through the trail of destruction left by a huge chunk of glacier that crashed down a mountainside in southern Russia, killing as many as 150 people.