'Little hope anyone alive under market rubble'

Power shovels scooped up tons of rubble at a Moscow market where the roof collapsed, killing at least 57 people, and officials said there was virtually no hope of finding anyone still alive under the wreckage.

“Maybe there is some kind of zone where there may be people, but the probability of this is very small,” Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said at the scene.

At least 32 other people were injured when the roof fell in before dawn yesterday, emergency officials said.

Russian agencies reported that one of the injured had died in a hospital today, but that could not immediately be confirmed.

The probable cause of the collapse was either the build-up of heavy snow, design flaws or maintenance errors, Moscow Prosecutor Anatoly Zuyev said.

Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation on charges of negligence leading to deaths, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

Luzhkov has ruled out terrorism as a possible cause.

The news agency also quoted Zuyev as saying that prosecutors had written the market director in December about maintenance violations, but he did not specify what they were.

Virtually all the victims were workers from the former Soviet republics, among the thousands who have poured into the Russian capital to fill low-paying jobs such as those at the city’s produce and housewares markets. At least 22 victims were Azerbaijani, NTV television reported.

Azerbaijan’s state airlines AZAL will organise a special flight home for the bodies once all are identified, first deputy general director Sabir Ilyasov said. The country’s president has the government to help the victims’ relatives.

Emergency officials said it was impossible to say how many people had been in the Basmanny market in east-central Moscow when it collapsed, but survivors and witnesses said there could have been up to 100 people or more performing wholesale transactions or simply sleeping in the building.

The market is one of the city’s biggest wholesale and retail markets, and some officials expressed relief that the collapse did not occur later in the day, when it would have been filled with shoppers taking advantage of the first day of a three-day weekend marking Defenders of the Fatherland Day, honouring Russia’s armed forces.

Several inches of wet snow had fallen before the collapse, on top of the 18.5ins that had fallen since the start of winter, the weather service said.

The market was built in 1974. Its roof, which had a special gutter, was designed to clear itself of snow, the mayor said. The city had already been planning to tear down the market and build a new, modern shopping mall in its place, Luzhkov said.

The Interfax news agency reported the market was designed by Nodar Kancheli, the same architect who drafted the plans for Moscow’s Transvaal water park, where the roof collapsed in February 2004, killing 28 people. Prosecutors have blamed that collapse on design flaws.

Kancheli came to the market after the collapse and was later questioned by investigators, Russian news agencies reported.

He said possibilities for the collapse were a build-up of snow, the addition of kiosks on the mezzanine or corrosion.