Seven people, including four children, died on Monday night when flames swept through a rundown building squatted by African families. It was the second unexplained blaze in three days to hit a block housing immigrants in Paris, prompting fears of deliberate attacks.
”We have no evidence to suggest arson, and both buildings were plainly unsafe,” a police spokesperson said on Tuesday. ”But nor have we established the cause of these fires either. Both appear to have started in the stairwell, not a common place.”
The head of Paris city hall’s housing department, Jean-Yves Mano, said earlier that the fire that killed 17, including 14 children, last Friday in the 13th arrondissement was caused by an ”external factor”. If there had not been ”an intervention from an outside element, the building would not have burned,” he said, refusing to go into further detail.
Monday’s fire was in a squalid former hotel of five storeys in the rue du Roi-Doré in the sought-after Marais quarter. After years of talks, the building, abandoned by its owners since the early 1990s, had recently been acquired by the SIEMP, a city housing association, and was awaiting renovation.
About 130 firefighters tackled the blaze for more than three hours. Before the building’s interior collapsed, they found the bodies of the Fofanas family: a father, mother pregnant with twins, and two children.
On the fourth floor, a mother threw her son of six out of the window in an attempt to save him. She perished in the flames with a three-year-old child; the boy died of his injuries in hospital on Tuesday morning. Two people were reported seriously injured.
Bambaya Coumba, from Côte d’Ivoire, who lived in the building, told French radio that he had seen at least two men jump from windows. ”We had all been talking a lot about the fire in the 13th arrondissement,” he said. ”We were frightened because our building too was in a very bad state.”
Awa, another resident, said: ”We were an embarrassment to the rich white people who live here. A blot on the landscape. We fetched water in iron bowls; cooked on the street.”
According to city hall, 22 families, mainly Côte d’Ivoire, moved in illegally in 1999. A dozen families had since been rehoused, but no housing could be found for the remainder because ”they did not have valid residence permits to live in France”.
Agence France Presse filmed the building last year for a documentary that showed crumbling, lead-contaminated walls, a fragile wooden staircase and dilapidated rooms completely unsuitable for housing families. The wiring appeared unsafe and bowls and basins served as sinks and baths. There was only one working toilet and no other running water.
”It was like hell,” a man who had lived in the block for three years told French media. ”The ceilings were falling in, there were wires everywhere, there were rats, cockroaches in the food. The women had to go and get water from a tap in the street to wash and to cook.”
The head of SIEMP, René Dutrey, said it was one of 400 council-owned blocks in the French capital that were in ”exceptionally bad condition”. A regional official, Jean-Paul Huchon, said between 10 000 and 12 000 buildings in the greater Paris area were unfit for habitation, and 300 000 people were on a waiting list for decent public housing.
The city’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, said Paris suffered from ”a terrible problem of unsafe and unhealthy buildings”. He added: ”I ask the state to acknowledge it. In particular, we would like help from those wealthy neighbouring départements that do not welcome so many people in a precarious position.”
The two latest fires follow a blaze in a budget hostel last April in which 24 immigrants died. The fires have sparked outrage over safety standards in cheap hotels and rundown buildings used for immigrant accommodation, and a wider debate about housing policy and the treatment of those seeking residence permits.
France ”cannot accept that those who live on its territory … can live in such conditions,” a former prime minister, Edouard Balladur, said on French radio.
Francois Bayrou, leader of the UDF party, said: ”This is a problem of urban planning, of housing policy, of immigration, of people without residence permits, of misery, of exclusion all coming together.”
A Green party deputy Paris mayor, Yves Contassot, said France ”must stop this, must get out of this unbelievable and inadmissible situation, stop treating people like we were in the 18th century”.
French President Jacques Chirac asked investigators to be ”extremely diligent” and called for ”all relevant authorities” to work together to avoid a recurrence. The president added: ”I want to stress how much this situation is unworthy of the natural requirements that we owe to people here in France, whatever their origin or nationality.” – Guardian Unlimited Â