The owner of an illegal nursing home in Western Siberia has been sentenced to six years in prison over a January 2021 fire that killed seven people.
The Tyumen district court sentenced Olga Vilyamson on July 18 after finding her guilty of manslaughter and violating safety regulations.
Investigators say Vilyamson ran an unregistered private nursing home for elderly people in her three-story house in the town of Borovsky in 2019. Vilyamson had no legal contracts with the relatives of the elderly people she took care of.
When a fire broke out in the building in the middle of the night on January 9, 2021, Vilyamson did not tell firefighters that there were elderly people inside.
She and two elderly people managed to escape the house, while four men and three women died. All of the victims were over the age of 70.
Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin said at the time that he had taken the probe into the incident under his personal control.
Deadly fires caused by violations of safety regulations or faulty wiring are common in Russia.