Until the end there was hope that they would be alive.
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The ministry’s spokesman said that rescuers also prevented an explosion of 30 cylinders containing household gas in the blazing warehouse for plastic goods.
News reports said the seven missing were on the roof of the burning building when a section of it collapsed.
The Emergencies Ministry said that eight firemen died while trying to extinguish the blaze. “Thanks to them, 100 employees have been saved from the warehouse which was on fire”, said Andrei Mishchenko, Deputy Head of the Emergencies Ministry in Moscow.
Firetrucks still surrounded the site on Friday morning and firefighters had set up a makeshift memorial to their dead comrades, lighting candles and placing red carnations on a table.
This is the latest deadly inferno to hit the Russian capital, where safety standards are often low.
Millions of labourers from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus come to Russian Federation each year to earn much-needed cash given the lack of employment in their impoverished homelands.
It was used to store artificial flowers, its owner said. “It is a high-risk facility: chemicals, flammable materials, ammonia, pressurized tanks and other risky materials are normally stored there – those would have been hazardous to the health of anyone living in the vicinity”, Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov said in a Friday statement.
There are suspicions that radiators had been left on, overwhelming the building’s electricity circuit.
In January, 12 people including three children died in a huge fire at a textile factory in the east of the city.
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Russia’s Investigation Committee has opened an inquiry into the accident.
