Paris fire kills 17 immigrants
2005-08-26 15:16
Paris - Fourteen children and three adults - one a pregnant woman ? died on Friday in an inferno that gutted a Paris apartment block housing African immigrant families as horrified neighbours heard the youngsters screaming for help, witnesses and officials said.
The blaze, one of the worst in the capital since the end of World War II, swept up the stairwell of the building in the 13th district in the southeast of the French capital.
"It was horrible to hear the children's screams," Oumar Cisse, the building's supervisor, told AFP outside the address.
He and firemen said some of the panicked residents jumped from their windows in the seven-storey building before firecrews arrived with ladders.
President Jacques Chirac issued a statement expressing the nation's sympathy with the families. "This ghastly catastrophe has sent all of France into mourning," he said.
Officials said the building was home to 12 families mostly from Mali, but also from Senegal, Ivory Coast and Gambia. It housed 100 children and 30 adults, they said.
As well as the 17 people killed, another 30 were injured. The French Red Cross said one family lost four of its six children in the tragedy.
An investigation had begun into the cause of the blaze. A state prosecutor in charge of the inquiry, Jean-Claude Marin, said it appeared the flames began on the ground floor in the stairwell and were fanned by an opening in the roof. Arson was not ruled out.
A fire brigade spokesperson told reporters that "the stairwell was immediately burnt out, that's why the people took to the windows." Most of the victims were asphyxiated, he said.
Residents said the building, built at the beginning of the 20th century, was dilapidated, with cracks in the walls, rats running loose, and the sizeable families crowding into small apartments, often 12 at a time. The wooden staircase creaked and shook every time it was used, they said.
The victims who died were all "caught in a trap - the trap of poverty," said one survivor, who gave his name as Djoure.
The Federation of African Workers in France claimed the building was insalubrious and demanded the survivors be found decent lodgings.
But the head of the Emmaus charitable association that managed the building as a hostel for previously homeless immigrants rejected accusations that it was dirty, an obvious fire risk or that it was overcrowded.
"In these apartments, you have families that are extremely large, with a lot of children -- but it was still one apartment per family," Martin Hirsch told RTL radio.