The government has commissioned the Finance Ministry and local governments to suspend licenses for gambling business for a month, in order to carry out a thorough fire and sanitary inspection of gambling institutions.
According to an UNIAN correspondent, the respective decision was made at an extraordinary session of government on Thursday.
“The accident that happened in the gambling hall in Dnipropetrovsk, I’m afraid, the majority of country’s gambling halls are in the same condition, because they opened gambling halls everywhere”, Yulia Tymoshenko stressed speaking about the necessity to suspend the licenses.
“During this period, law-enforcement agencies and the State Fire Safety Department of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine should carry out a complex inspection of fire safety and labor protection in all gambling houses, and guarantee a constant monitoring of their working regime”, the Prime Minister emphasized.
Besides, the government commissioned the Fuel-Energy Ministry to inspect the state of electric network systems in gambling houses.
As UNIAN reported earlier, ten people were killed and another ten injured in a blaze caused by an explosion in a slot machine arcade in east Ukraine early on Thursday, a local emergencies spokesman said. The blast shook the Metro Jack Pot arcade in Dnipropetrovsk at 00:45 a.m. local time [09:45 p.m. Wednesday GMT], killing nine instantly, one person died later in hospital. Ten others have been hospitalized. The rescue operation involved 57 firefighters and 17 fire trucks, the emergencies spokesman said. The fire was extinguished at 01:40 a.m. local time [10:40 p.m. Wednesday GMT].
