Russia, Deaths | featured news

Thirty-eight people were feared dead after a fire raged through an isolated psychiatric hospital north of Moscow on Friday, killing some patients in their beds and others who were trapped by barred windows. Most of the patients died in their sleep inhaling the fumes as they were likely sedated by prescribed medicine, a police source told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose body was found in the locked bathroom of his luxury mansion near London over the weekend, died by hanging, British police said on Monday.

Reports that a 3-year-old adopted Russian child died in Texas last month set off a furor here Tuesday, with Russian officials declaring the boy had been abused, although U.S. authorities say the death is still under investigation.

A university instructor on Friday confessed to killing two women in an apartment where a message demanding freedom for jailed members of the Pussy Riot band was scrawled on the wall, news reports said. The killing in the city of Kazan of a 76-year-old woman and her 38-year-old daughter attracted nationwide attention because of the Pussy Riot connection. Three members of the feminist punk band were sentenced two weeks ago to two years in prison in a politically charged case.

Indonesian special forces have found the cockpit voice recorder from a Russian passenger jet that smashed into the side of a volcano, killing 45 people.

A Russian jet carrying a top ice hockey team crashed while taking off Wednesday in western Russia, killing at least 43 people and leaving two critically injured, officials said.

A ship carrying 173 people sailing in Russia's Volga river sank on Sunday, leaving at least one person dead, emergency officials said.

At least 44 people were killed and eight injured when a passenger plane broke up and caught fire on coming into land in fog in north-western Russia, an Emergency Ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday.

An explosion struck a subway station in the Belarus capital of Minsk on Monday, Russian state media reported.

A terrorist suicide bomber is blamed for the Moscow airport attack that killed 31 people and wounded 130 more, Russian state TV reports