Sixteen killed in house fire in village near Kiev

KIEV (Reuters) - Seventeen people have been killed after a fire broke out in a residential building housing elderly people in a village near Kiev, Ukraine's state emergency service said in a statement on Sunday.

It said the fire broke out in the early hours of Sunday morning in a privately-owned two-storey building that was temporarily housing 35 people in the village of Litochky, 37 kilometres (23 miles) northeast of Kiev.

"Emergency services units saved 18 people, five of whom have been hospitalised with burns of varying degrees of severity," it said. The fire was localised at 05:25 a.m. (0325 BST), it said.

Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said the fire was a terrible tragedy that had caused irreparable loss and called for an immediate investigation into its causes, a statement on the government website said.

(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice. Editing by Jane Merriman)