- REUTERS
Women grieve as they stand at a Moscow morgue after identifying a person who died when a roof of a market building collapsed in Moscow on Friday.
MOSCOW (AP):
Relatives carried the bodies of victims of a roof collapse at a Moscow market out of a morgue in wooden boxes yesterday to put them on flights home, while the discovery of more corpses in the rubble brought the death toll to 66.
Five bodies were found overnight and during the day by emergency workers picking through the ruins of the building, raising the toll in Thursday morning's disaster from 61, a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry said. Of 32 people listed as injured, 24 remained hospitalised, he said.
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.
WOODEN BOXES
Outside a morgue not far from the remains of the Basmanny market in east-central Moscow, relatives and friends of victims hoisted foil-lined wooden boxes containing their bodies and placed them in a minibus for transport to an airport.
Women wiped away tears as the men carried the boxes, each with the name of the victim and destination of the body scrawled in blue magic marker - in several cases, a single town the Caucasus Mountain nation of Azerbaijan. One young man sobbed nearby, his face in his hands.
On Friday, chief city prosecutor Anatoly Zuyev said that the market's director, Mark Mishiyev, had been detained and charged with negligence leading to deaths. He also said prosecutors had ordered an analysis by explosives experts though both officials and survivors have said there was no blast and that a comprehensive construction analysis would follow.
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying more bodies may yet be found under the massive debris.
CONTRASTING REPORTS
There were sharply contrasting reports on how many people were injured in the collapse and how many of the injured were in life-threatening condition.
Luzhkov said Friday that 60 victims remained in hospitals, three of them in severe condition, according to ITAR-Tass. Yevgeny Yevdokin, the city's chief anesthesiologist, said earlier in the day that 21 people were hospitalised, all of them in intensive care.
Emergency officials said it was impossible to say how many people had been in the market when it collapsed, but survivors and witnesses said there could have been 100 or more conducting wholesale business or simply sleeping in the building.
