At least 37 have been killed and 40 children unaccounted for after blaze started in a children’s trampoline park.
The parents of three sisters have described receiving desperate phone calls from their trapped daughters just minutes before they died in a locked cinema as flames engulfed a Russian shopping centre.
Today, a litany of fire safety violations were blamed for the death toll in the fire in the industrial Siberian city of Kemerovo reaching as high as 64, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Investigators said fire exits were blocked and the fire alarm system was switched off by a security guard shortly after the fire broke out.
Authorities have launched a criminal investigation into the fire.
Four people were arrested and questioned by police today, including the head of the company responsible for servicing the fire alarm system and the technical director of the company that owned the shopping centre.
"Our children burned while we just watched," said Olga Lillyevyali, who rushed to the shopping centre as the fire raged, Russian news website Meduza reported.
Her three daughters, twins aged 11 and their 5-year-old sister, had been dropped off at the cinema by their father, Alexander Lillyevyali, to see children's film Sherlock Gnomes.
When he got a phone call an hour later from one of his daughters to say she was stuck behind locked doors as the fire spread, he raced upstairs.
Russian media reported people saying that the cinemas locked the doors to stop people entering without a ticket.
"I started to crawl but I realised I had no strength," Lillyevyali said.
"I had inhaled so much smoke that I was on the verge of fainting. My daughter was ringing and ringing me. I could only shout down the phone that she should try and get out of the cinema but I couldn't do anything – there were flames in front of me."
Media reports suggested the blaze broke out on the fourth floor of the building, possibly at a trampolining centre, and spread rapidly, generating huge clouds of billowing black smoke.
Witnesses said staff did not arrange for evacuation from the building, which was converted from a former confectionery factory in 2013.
Some were quick to blame lax regulations on Russia's fire safety inspection authorities, who have been accused of taking bribes to turn a blind eye to breaches.
A woman lays a toy by a floral tribute for the victims of the fire in a multi-storey shopping centre in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. Photo / AP
Opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny wrote: "The whole system of fire safety oversight has become a huge trough of corruption. It hasn't had any other goals for a long time."
The Prosecutor General's Office ordered all shopping centres in Russia to be checked for fire safety features.
It was not immediately clear how many other children had died in the blaze. Authorities said eight of the 23 victims so far identified were kids, but the shopping centre was full of families enjoying the first weekend of the Easter school holidays.
A young girl from the central Russian city of Kazan, Maya Yerokhina, believed to be among the victims, updated the status on her profile page on Russian social networking site Vkontakte during the fire to read: "This is the end."
An 11-year old boy was in intensive care after jumping from a third-floor window to escape the thick smoke during a dramatic escape caught on camera.
His parents and a sibling reportedly died.
One piece of footage aired by state television showed people desperately trying to escape by battering down a closed door as flames crept closer.
Eight children, mostly aged between 11 and 12, from the same school in the village of Treschevsky perished in the blaze while on a trip marking the end of the school term.
About 200 animals, including rabbits, turtles, pigs, goats are also believed to have died in the shopping centre's petting zoo.
