PERM, Russia -- Five people in the Russian city of Perm have died after drinking tainted alcohol, the latest in a string of deadly incidents involving bootleg liquor.
The Investigative Committee said on November 18 that three members of a family and two of their neighbors died a day earlier after consuming the alcohol.
The committee said that it had launched a probe into what it called "selling products that do not correspond to safety regulations which caused the deaths of two or more people."
The same day, police in Kazan, the capital of the neighboring Tatarstan region, said they had detained four men suspected of producing and selling alcohol containing methanol, a toxic type of industrial alcohol..
Two days earlier, 15 university students were hospitalized in Kazan after they drank alcohol containing methanol. Three young women remain hospitalized in serious condition because of the tainted beverage.
Last month, mass poisoning with tainted alcohol in the Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, and Orenburg regions killed more than 70 people.
Poisonings involving homemade or bootleg alcohol occur regularly in Russia as people seek out cheaper options than store-bought vodka.
In December 2016, 78 people died in and around the Siberian city of Irkutsk after drinking a scented herbal bath lotion that contained methanol.
