Nine patients of a clinic for the mentally ill in Siberia died in a fire Sunday, a day after a blaze at a Moscow drug treatment centre killed 45, officials said.

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 local time.

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.

Korchagin said that hospital officials tried to extinguish the blaze on their own and were slow to report it to officials. "They only reported it 1 1/2 hours after the fire started," he said in a telephone interview.

In the fire in Moscow early Saturday, 45 women died in a fire at a drug treatment centre when they were trapped behind locked gates and barred windows.

The fire was likely caused by arson, a senior firefighter said.

"The number of victims has reached 45," Deputy Emergencies Minister Alexander Chupriyan told reporters outside Drug Treatment Hospital No 17 in southwest Moscow.

"Judging by the position of the bodies, people tried to get out but there was only one fire exit available."

Crying relatives of the dead arrived to the hospital as ambulances hurried to and from the yard of a two-storey building with white grilles on windows.

Some windows had their glass smashed as patients tried to break out of the building but grilles were intact.

All the victims were women. Most were patients undergoing treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. Two were clinic staff.

(China Daily December 11, 2006)