To the late-night audience watching women take off their clothes at Moscow’s racy 911 strip club, the fire show seemed to be just another part of the night’s entertainment.

Their amusement turned to horror when the stunt went wrong and engulfed the club in flames, killing 10 people and forcing more than 150 others to flee for their lives.

Moscow prosecutors began an investigation into the blaze, which broke out at about 3am yesterday. There were differing accounts of how the fire started, with some witnesses saying that a barman’s clothing had caught light during the performance.

Russian news agencies reported, however, that the bartender had been performing a stunt for customers when he tipped burning alcohol over himself, triggering a fireball that filled the club with deadly fumes.

Yevgeni Bobylev, a spokesman for the Moscow division of the Russian Emergency Service Ministry, told state television: “A barman’s clothing caught fire, after which the flame spread to a five-litre container with ethanol and then the stage caught fire. The legality of this fire show is being checked.”

Two Bulgarian men were among the six men and four women who died, all apparently from inhaling toxic fumes. Four people were treated in hospital for injuries, officials said.

The strip club leases part of the historic building that houses the Lenkom theatre, which was built in 1907 and is one of Moscow’s best-known stages. Officials said that fire damage covered about 100sq m (1,075sq ft).

Moscow has gained a reputation for a wild nightlife since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with clubs competing for customers by offering ever more outlandish and extreme entertainment.

Lack of regulation and a culture of bribery means that there is little oversight of the safety implications by city officials.

The fire is the fourth big accident in the past nine days in Russia, a series of tragedies in which 187 people have died, that have highlighted lax attitudes towards safety regulations.

A commercial airliner crashed into the ground short of the airport runway in Samara on March 17, killing six people. Two days later a methane gas explosion at a Siberian coalmine left 108 dead, and the following day a fire at a nursing home in southern Russia killed 63 elderly people.

The local fire service had been disbanded in the town where the nursing home caught fire, which meant that rescue crews took an hour to reach the scene. A new alarm system had not been fully installed and there were reports that a night watchman had ignored initial warnings from the system.

Moscow suffered its worst blaze in 30 years in December when 45 women died at a drug treatment centre where the windows were barred and the doors locked.

Around 17,000 people were killed in fires last year, according to officials at the Emergency Ministry.

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