At least nine people were killed when an apartment building partially collapsed in the town of Shakhan in the Karaganda region in central Kazakhstan on January 1, the Interior Ministry’s hotline said.
"The death toll currently stands at nine. There are bodies of three men, three women, three children, two of them born in 2016 and one in 2010," a spokesman for the republic’s emergencies committee of the Interior Ministry Ruslan Imankulov said, adding that two people have been taken to hospital.
"The emergencies committee has immediately sent rescuers and equipment to the site of the accident, all residents have been evacuated from the damaged building," TASS cited Imankulov as saying.
Four survivors, two of them children, have been pulled from the rubble.
The cause of the collapse is being established. Some 280 people, including police officers, rescuers, medical workers are involved in the rescue operation.
