KIEV, May 29 — Seventeen people have been killed after a fire broke out in a residential building housing elderly people in a village near Kiev, Ukraine’s state emergency service said in a statement today.

It said the fire broke out in the early hours of this morning in a privately owned two-storey building that was temporarily housing 35 people in the village of Litochky, 37 kilometres northeast of Kiev.

“Emergency services units saved 18 people, five of whom have been hospitalised with burns of varying degrees of severity,” it said. The fire was localised at 05:25 a.m. (0225 GMT), it said.

Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said the fire was a terrible tragedy that had caused irreparable loss and called for an immediate investigation into its causes, a statement on the government website said. — Reuters