Russian mourns disasters' victims

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Russia is holding a day of mourning for at least 176 people who died in three disasters over the past four days.

A fire at an old people's home killed 63 people on Tuesday, a day after at least 107 miners died in a gas blast. A plane crash on Saturday left six dead.

Flags are flying at half mast across Russia and television entertainment programmes have been cancelled.

There are fears that the death toll will rise further as the search for at least three missing miners continues.

President Vladimir Putin, who declared the day of mourning, opened Wednesday's cabinet meeting in Moscow with a minute's silence for the victims of the fatal accidents.

"You have to do your best to investigate the reasons at the highest level ... and to draw corresponding conclusions," the president told Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov.

Earlier, Mr Putin expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims.

Several Russian newspapers on Wednesday claimed that the mine blast and the fire at the nursing home may have been avoided if adequate safety regulations had been in place.

'Utter devastation'

Some 93 people were rescued from the Ulyanovskaya mine in Siberia's Kemerovo region after the methane explosion on Monday morning.

<a class="" href="/1/hi/world/europe/6470949.stm">Russia's mine safety woes</a>

More than 200 people were underground when the blast occurred at a depth of about 270m (885 feet).

Virtually the whole of the mine's management died, and a British engineer was also among the dead.

Rescuers described a scene of utter devastation, with collapsed and flooded mineshafts and bodies ripped apart.

The search for the missing miners continued on Wednesday, as the first of many funerals started to take place in Novokuznetsk.

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow says it is Russia's worst mining disaster for a generation.

Many of Russia's mines have poor safety standards and have not been updated since the fall of communism.

But the Ulyanovskaya mine was opened only four-and-a-half years ago and had been fitted with modern equipment, officials said.

Gutted nursing house

On Tuesday, 63 people were killed by fire which swept through an old people's home in southern Russia.

Officials say most of the victims did not have close relatives

The fire broke out at a home in the village of Kamyshevatskaya, in the Krasnodar region, near the Black Sea.

It started early on Tuesday morning, an official said, but firefighting crews did not arrive from Yeysk, 50km (30 miles) away, for more than an hour.

There had been 93 people in the building, officials said.

Samara crash

The plane crash happened on Saturday in central Russia.

Survivors said the rescue efforts were slow

The Tu-134 jet broke up while landing in thick fog in the city of Samara, some 900km (550 miles) south-east of Moscow.

There were 50 passengers and seven crew on board the plane, 28 of whom were injured in the accident, six seriously.

Investigators are currently examining the flight data recorders to try to determine the exact cause of the crash.

Regional prosecutor Alexei Kopylov has told NTV television that pilot error and bad weather were regarded as the primary causes of the crash.