Nine patients of a clinic for the mentally ill in Siberia died in a fire yesterday, a day after a blaze at a Moscow drug treatment center killed 45 women who were trapped behind locked gates, officials said.

The accidents underlined widespread neglect for fire safety rules in Russia, which records about 18,000 fire deaths a year.

The fire in the psychiatric hospital in the town of Taiga in the Kemerovo region in central Siberia, about 3,500 kilometers east of Moscow, erupted shortly after midnight.

Nine patients of the clinic died and 15 were hospitalized, said Valery Korchagin, a spokesman for the regional branch of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry. About 200 other patients escaped unhurt, he said.

Russian television stations showed the hospital's two-story building engulfed by fire and a line of half-dressed patients walking through a blizzard.

Korchagin said hospital officials tried to put out the blaze on their own and were slow to notify authorities.

"They reported it one and a half hours after the fire started," he said.

The cause of the fire wasn't immediately clear.

In the Moscow blaze, 45 women died at a drug treatment center when they were trapped behind locked gates and barred windows.

"Judging by the placement of the bodies, they really tried to get out," said Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Chupriyan. He said all the victims - reportedly 43 patients and two staffers - were dead by the time firefighters arrived.

The blaze erupted in a wooden cabinet in a kitchen at one end of a second-floor corridor, officials said. The main exit was blocked by a locked gate that staff members could not open in time, and the only other way out was cut off by smoke, Russia's chief fire inspector Yuri Nenashev said.

Nenashev said he was "90 percent certain" the blaze was set deliberately, and some reports said that the fire could have been started by a patient.

Experts say fire deaths have skyrocketed in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in part because of a disregard for safety standards.

Editor: Yan