The director of and chief engineer of a Moscow printing house where 17 people were killed in a fire last year have been convicted and sentenced.
On August 18, a court in the Russian capital found Sergei Moskvin guilty of violating of fire-safety regulations and sentenced him to 2 1/2 years in a so-called colony settlement -- an open penitentiary in which convicts live close to an industrial facility or a farm where they work.
The chief engineer of the printing house, Anton Yatskov, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in a colony settlement.
Fourteen Kyrgyz migrant workers and three Russian citizens were killed in the blaze on August 27, 2016.
The victims were all women or girls, and one of them was pregnant.
Russia has a poor fire safety record, with fire death rates substantially higher than in many Western countries.
According to figures from the International Association of Fire and Rescue Services, there were 10,068 fire deaths in Russia in 2014 and 3,275 in the United States, whose population is roughly twice that of Russia.
