Chernobyl 30 years on: former residents remember life in the ghost city of Pripyat

Evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear accident remember relatives, friends and colleagues who died - and the abandoned city declared unsafe for 24,000 years

In a biting winter wind, Alexander Petrovich Zabirchenko walks slowly along a memorial to firefighters and workers who died in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, touching each of the portraits engraved in granite. He does not shiver or complain of the cold. He is a big man and draws himself up to his full height before each sombre stone.

"Here is Valeri, and here Vladimir and Alexandr and Anatoli " I knew these men," he says. "I worked with them. They were colleagues and friends."