A fire broke out at one of Moscow’s biggest shopping malls early Friday morning, with part of the building collapsing, emergency services said, hampering firefighters’ efforts to put out the blaze. made it difficult.
The fire spread to an area of approximately 75,000 square meters in the Mega shopping center in the city of Khimki, near the capital of Russia, officials said. One person died in the fire, officials said.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which investigates major crimes, said it was investigating the cause of the fire. The head of the Emergency Situations Service of the Moscow region said that the fire appeared to have occurred as a result of violations of safety rules during renovation work in the building.
Mega was one of the first IKEA stores in the Moscow region, before the companies left Russia after the Ukraine conflict, to many Western retail chains.
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