MOSCOW, Russia -- African students lay flowers in front of the burned University hostel in Moscow yesterday. Thirty-six mainly Asian and African foreign students died Monday in a fire that ripped through the university, reportedly the Russian capital's most deadly blaze for a decade, police said. (Photo: AFP)

TWO Jamaicans are now in hospital in Moscow after they were injured in a deadly university hostel blaze that killed 36 foreign students in that Russian city early yesterday morning.

The Jamaicans -- Lenworth MaCalla and Patrick Craig, both 22 years old -- are among 57 students who jumped from the five-storey building to escape the raging inferno.

Yesterday, Moscow officials reported that 47 students were in critical condition and another 10 in an extremely critical state. The Interfax news agency quoted city health officials as saying that more than 180 students were hospitalised.

Observer sources in Moscow said MaCalla jumped from the fifth floor of the Moscow Peoples' Friendship University and sustained fractures, including a broken hip, while Craig, who jumped from the fourth floor, suffered minor injuries.

According to Clover Mattocks, a Jamaican student from St Mary, MaCalla will undergo an operation and is expected to remain in the Sergey Botkin Hospital for up to eight weeks.

"His hip has been dislocated and we have been informed by the doctors to donate blood," Mattocks told the Observer.

She also said that doctors informed them that Craig, who is being treated at Moscow's number seven hospital, could be released in three weeks, "but he has to be examined for internal bleeding".

McCalla and Craig left the island on November 12 to take up five-year scholarships in veterinary science. Three other Jamaicans -- Sidoney Thompson, 20; Joel Powell, 21 and Dwayne Henry 22 -- left at the same time.

The five scholarships were awarded by the Russian Embassy in Jamaica.

Yesterday, the Russian Government opened a criminal inquiry to determine the cause of the fire, which officials initially suggested could have been started deliberately.

Education Minister Vladimir Filippov said that some of the students could have been responsible, adding that they were looking for two Africans, whose first-floor room was where the fire started before spreading to the entire building.

They were seen running away shortly before with a third African student, who had since been located.

However, Deputy Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev later said there was no sign "of criminal evidence", and the most likely cause was a faulty electrical appliance.

The blaze broke out at 2:30 am (2330 GMT) and engulfed a hostel of the university, in the southwest of the capital, and was only extinguished three hours later.

Russian television showed a roaring red blaze and dense black smoke rising up from the hostel as 40 teams of firefighters struggled to douse the flames under a violent snowstorm.

As dawn broke, all that was left of the student accommodation, where more than 270 people had been sleeping at the time of the fire, was a blackened ruin with shattered windows.

Firemen sifting through the charred remains of student rooms found 32 bodies, including three outside the building.

One more person died in an ambulance and three others in hospital. Africans and Asians accounted for the majority of the dead.

Some students blamed the fire services for responding late, saying that the first firefighters took 20 minutes to arrive and the biggest fire engines an hour and a half after the blaze erupted.

Other students, however, blamed the dormitory night supervisor for not acting quickly enough when the blaze was reported by two Nigerian girls. They said that it was other students in the nearby building who noticed the fire and called the fire brigade.

"He was lazy and did not want to move quickly, and instead of calling the fire brigade he was trying to put out the blaze himself," one student told the Observer.

Rohan Smith, an executive of the Jamaican Students Association, said that the incident traumatised his colleagues.

Ruel Currie, another Jamaican student, said the only thing they were able to save was their passports because they were with a government department that registers the passports of all students and issues them with an ID called a "Spravka", which they are required to keep at all times.

The hostel was designed in the 1960s to help ease a housing shortage in Moscow. It was popularly called "Kruchevniki", for former Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev.

The Peoples' Friendship University, formerly known as Patrice Lumumba University, was set up in Soviet times to train students from developing countries who were then supposed to spread Soviet and Communist influence.

-- Patrick Sean Morris, who is based in Helsinki, Finland, contributed to this story.

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