14 November, Vitebsk /Sergey Kochetov - BELTA/. Five people died in fires in the Vitebsk region over the past weekend, the propaganda and training centre at the regional department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations informed a BELTA correspondent. In all tragic cases, the preliminary cause of the incidents is considered to be carelessness while smoking by the deceased, some of whom were intoxicated at the time of the fire. On 12 November, in the Horadok district, an employee of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, in his free time, rescued an elderly woman from a fire in an apartment of a three-storey residential building. Valery Khramtsov, commander of a detachment of the local Ministry of Emergency Situations unit, noticed commotion and smoke near a neighbouring house, rushed to the scene and entered the apartment on the third floor, where he found a woman on the floor in the hallway, whom he carried to safety. The victim, born in 1951, was taken to the central district hospital diagnosed with poisoning from combustion products and first- to second-degree burns. Ministry of Emergency Situations officers who arrived at the scene extinguished the incident and discovered the body of the owner, born in 1951, in the one-room apartment. Presumably, the cause of the fire was carelessness while smoking by the deceased, who was intoxicated. Fatal fires were also registered in the Verkhnedvinsk and Senno districts, in Lepel and Sharkovshchyna. In all cases, men born between 1950 and 1956 died; they were either pensioners or unemployed, and almost all the deceased lived alone. -0-

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