Three little children died: the house of a large family caught fire in a village in Sverdlovsk Oblast.

      A private house in the Sverdlovsk village of Zlatogorova in the Beloyarsky District caught fire; a family of nine lived there. Three children — aged 5, 7 and 11 — died.

      When firefighters arrived, the fire had engulfed an area of 60 square meters. The adults and four children managed to get outside on their own. Currently three schoolchildren — aged 9, 12 and 14 — are in hospital. The one-and-a-half-year-old child was unharmed.

      "The preliminary cause of the fire is a malfunction in the operation of electrical equipment. There was no fire detector in the house: the device would have emitted a piercing sound when reacting to smoke and would have warned of the danger, giving everyone a chance to escape," the Emergency Ministry said.

      Careless handling of fire is also being considered among the causes of the blaze.

      "The prosecutor's office, during its supervisory activities, will assess compliance with the requirements of legislation on the protection of the life and health of minors," the agency clarified.

      The Investigative Committee for the Sverdlovsk Region has opened a criminal case under the article "Causing death by negligence to two or more persons" in connection with the fire.

      "The large family was not registered with the preventive services. More precise circumstances of the tragedy are being established by employees of the Emergency Ministry, the police and the Investigative Committee," said the press secretary of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk Region, Valeriy Gorelykh.

      The bodies of the deceased children have been sent for examination to determine the cause of death.

      Earlier it was reported that in Yekaterinburg two children were hospitalized after a fire in a newly built apartment building.