NUR-SULTAN — Five children from the same family have died in a fire that swept through an apartment in Kazakhstan’s southern region of Zhambyl.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said on February 19 that the youngest of the deceased children was born last year, while the eldest was born in 2015.

The fire raced through an apartment on the third floor of a five-story residential building in the town of Zhanatas. The children’s father was at work and the mother had left the house to visit a shop when the blaze broke out.

A special commission has been established to investigate the deadly fire, which occurred a day after another fire killed a toddler in the southern region of Qyzylorda.

In early February 2019, a fire in a small house near the Kazakh capital, Nur-Sultan, killed five children from the same family when both parents were at work on night shifts.

That deadly fire sparked waves of protests across the Central Asian nation, with people demanding increased social support and financial allowances for families with several children and low incomes.