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Children die in Paris hostel fire

by Open-Publishing - Friday 26 August 2005
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Edito The "without" - Migrants Logement Poverty-Precariousness France

Fourteen children and three adults have died in a fire that swept through a building in Paris housing African immigrants, French police say.

The fire broke out in the capital’s 13th district shortly after midnight. Thirty people were injured.

Some 200 firefighters took two hours to control the blaze and help many of the building’s 130 residents to safety.

In April, 24 people died in a fire at a Paris hotel also housing immigrants, prompting calls for better housing.

Friday’s fire broke out in a stairwell in the dilapidated, seven-storey building at around 0017 (2217 GMT Thursday).

Some 210 firemen from 22 stations around the city were called to the scene, managing to bring the blaze under control after about two hours.

Investigation under way

The building was reportedly used by charitable organisations to house immigrants.

Local residents said many of those living in the apartment block were from Senegal and Mali.

"I heard children cry, families scream," Oumar Cisse told journalists after he was evacuated from the building. "Some children were yelling for their mothers and fathers.

"Lots of people wanted to jump out of the windows."

He said the building was "very dirty", and infested with rats and mice.

"We were very badly housed, we had been waiting for new homes since 1991," he said.

The injured were being treated in hospitals across the French capital.

About 100 of the building’s 130 residents were children, police said.

According to the French Red Cross, one family lost four of its six children in the blaze.

The BBC ’s Jacky Rowland in Paris says questions are being asked about why so many immigrant families are packed into shabby and potentially dangerous buildings in Paris.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy arrived at the scene of the fire in the early hours.

"We just saw the bodies of seven children who were asphyxiated. It’s an abominable spectacle," he said.

He said he wanted a "census" of all the buildings that could be at risk of fire.

The cause of the blaze is unknown but a criminal investigation is under way.

It is the worst fire since an inferno at the one-star Paris Opera hotel in April killed 24 people, at least 10 of them children, and injured more than 50.

In that disaster, too, many of the hotel guests were African immigrants waiting to be re-housed.

Police said at the time that a girlfriend of a night watchman admitted she may have started that blaze by accident after throwing a pile of clothes on top of candles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4186266.stm

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