8 die of alcohol poisoning in Russia; 10 others hospitalized

MOSCOW – Russia's top investigative agency says that at least eight people have died of alcohol poisoning in a Siberian city.

The Investigative Committee said Sunday that at least 18 people had got poisoned after consuming a bath lotion containing alcohol in Irkutsk, Russia's sixth-largest city with a population of 1.1 million. Eight of them have died and the 10 others have been hospitalized in grave condition.

The committee said that the bottles with lotion were marked with warnings that they aren't for internal use. It said the investigators have opened a probe into the incident.

Poisonings with surrogate alcohol are a regular occurrence in Russia, but the Irkutsk case was one of the deadliest such incidents in years.