A fire, possibly caused by an electrical fault, swept through a Moscow dormitory block in the early hours yesterday, killing 32 foreign students and injuring 139 others, local officials said.

With freezing temperatures outside, many of the casualties had jumped from windows to escape the blaze in the five-storey concrete block housing students from the developing world at Moscow?s Patrice Lumumba People?s Friendship University.

?It happened very fast. Some people jumped and were burnt so we tried to get them into ambulances,? Richard Mallobe, a sociology student from Liberia, told Reuters.

?People were jumping from the windows because it started on the second floor and there was no other way out. It was absolutely horrible.? Among the casualties were students from China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and a number of African countries, the trade union of foreign students told Interfax news agency.

?Twenty-eight people died inside the building, three bodies were discovered outside and one person died later,? a city police spokesman told Reuters.

He said 139 people had been treated for injuries and a total of 272 people, including students from China, Vietnam, Ecuador, Tahiti, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Angola, were registered as living in the block.

?After two hours, I could see people in the windows of the fifth floor leaning out and shouting,? said Silvio Fernandez, who escaped by climbing down a ladder. ?I?ve never seen anything like this.?

NTV television showed fire crews working through heavy snow to control the blaze, which gutted the top three floors of the building. They had extinguished the fire by about 0230 GMT, the police spokesman said.

Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov told NTV investigators suspected the fire was caused by an electrical fault. ?It is difficult to talk about the cause,? he said. ?According to preliminary information, which we have now investigated, the cause was domestic. Most likely, there was a short circuit in room 203.?

However, Russian agencies reported a criminal investigation had been opened and authorities were not ruling out arson. The university, founded in 1960, was named after a Congolese revolutionary and was originally designed to provide subsidised Socialist education to students from the developing world.