A fire at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top-secret spying facility in Moscow has sparked a mystery amid claims that three people were killed.
Aerial footage shot by a drone shows smoke pouring from the building as a fire brigade tackles the blaze.
A spokesman for the SVR foreign intelligence service claimed three workers were initially trapped by the fire but managed to escape.
Col Sergei Ivanov said: “The fire has been extinguished. No one was killed or injured.”
But a Russian media report claimed the three had “perished” in the basement cable “tunnel” due to an electrical short circuit which disabled the fire-suppression system and allowed the flames to spread.