While many are aware of the deadly 2019 Poland fire, far fewer are aware of a more recent fire in a Russian escape room that claimed the lives of 2 young women.
I’m going to share the timeline of the incident and dig into a few lessons that everyone can learn from this tragedy. I’m going to do my best to present straight facts in a clinical manner while telling this story. Some details may be slightly incorrect as I am doing my best to reconcile a variety of sources that were not written in English.
For the sake of anyone reading this who is less familiar with global escape room trends, I want to make it very clear: this is not how escape rooms operate in North America.
Please be warned, this story is as scary as it is heartbreaking.
Sequence of Events
On July 22, 2024, Asiyat (19) convinced her new husband Said (21) to go with her and her best friend Madina (25) to a quest room. (In Russia, the generic term for escape rooms is “quests.”)
The trio visited the regionally popular House of Horrors Quest Room in Makhachkala, Dagestan in Russia.
In the course of gameplay, Asiyat was shackled to a chair, while Madina was handcuffed to a chair. While they were restrained, an 18-year-old horror performer doused his gloves in gasoline, lit the gloves on fire in order to “increase the feeling of fear,” then picked up a chainsaw and menaced the women with his hands on fire. While the women were still chained, burning drops of gasoline dripped onto Madina, the saw, and the gas canister, igniting an inferno.
Said took off his shirt and attempted to put out the flames on Madina’s body.
Passersby who were going grocery shopping saw the fire and called for help, but they had to break bars off of the windows in order to assist. There were no fire exits, fire suppression systems, or means of egress.
Aftermath
Asiyat died from carbon monoxide inhalation, and Madina died from the burns that covered 97% of her body.
Said was hospitalized in “serious condition” with burns covering 50% of his body.
Asiyat and Said had gotten married just 5 days prior to this incident.
The police opened an investigation charging that the services “do not meet the requirements of security, which negligently resulted in the death of two persons.”
The 18-year-old gamemaster was arrested and faces up to 10 years in prison.
Huseyn Ibragimov, the owner of House of Horrors quest room, allegedly blames the performer, claiming that he had not permitted the use of fire within his game, and accused the gamemaster of adding this himself.
My Thoughts
As much as possible, I have kept this post to cold facts because this story is brutal. The truth is that reading these sources and writing this post has been awful. While I am not sharing them in this piece, I had to look at photos of the victims, one of them from the security feed shortly before the fire. I have read stories and personal anecdotes about the victims, and that made this job much more difficult.
It remains unclear how to distribute blame between the performer and the owner. One source that I read spoke to a person who had played a few weeks before this incident, and they did not report seeing any fire or gasoline, but they did confirm the use of restraints as well as a chainsaw (which presumably means that gasoline was on-premises.) In my opinion, both of them deserve a large amount of blame.
The performer was at best an idiot and at worst a madman. Either way, he killed two women and maimed a man.
The owner appears to have run a horror escape room with no means of egress while storing gasoline on-premises, and this resulted in fatalities and permanent injury. Assuming that he knew nothing about what his employee was doing, I still believe that his actions are criminally negligent.
I hope that justice finds both of them, but to add to the tragedy, it seems likely that these guys will probably end up on the frontline in Ukraine bringing more needless suffering.
The Point
We are publishing this report as part of Fire Week here at Room Escape Artist. This story is one year old, but it will be news to many people in the international escape room industry. It’s important that we all understand the dangers of fire.
No one can control for every single variable in their business. That’s why it is imperative to control the big ones.
Have a means of egress, and don’t introduce fire or combustibles into your games.
For more on the importance of fire safety in games, see yesterday’s article: Fire – Forbidden Escape Room Elements
A Special Thank You
Thank you to Dan Egnor for flagging this incident and Ana Ulin for helping me search the Russian web for sources.
Sources
- https://www.the-sun.com/news/11990240/two-killed-escape-room-taunted-with-chainsaws/
- https://ren.tv/video/embed/1243044
- https://www.gazeta.ru/social/2024/07/22/19440631.shtml
- https://news.ru/regions/umolyali-o-pomoshi-raskryty-podrobnosti-pozhara-na-kveste-v-mahachkale
- https://russian.rt.com/russia/article/1344704-dagestan-kvest-gibel
- https://www.kp.ru/daily/27610/4961981/
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