MOSCOW: At least 41 residents of the Siberian city of Irkutsk have died after drinking scented bath oil in a desperate search for an alcoholic high in one of the deadliest cases of its kind in years, Russian investigators said on Monday.
Use of counterfeit or surrogate alcohol is rife in Russia’s regions, where two years of economic pain have pushed more people below the poverty line.
Russian media reported that the victims were poor residents of Irkutsk, a hard scrabble city around 4,000-km east of Moscow.
The case underlines how hard up a large swath of the population is despite Moscow’s growing …read more
Source: The News International
