A fire early on Sunday which killed 15 people, including two children, was almost certainly the result of arson, according to police investigating the third major blaze in the Paris region in little over a week.
A police spokesperson said three local teenage girls had been remanded in custody, suspected of deliberately setting letterboxes alight in the communal hallway of an 18-storey council block in the suburb of L’Hay-les-Roses, a few kilometres south of the French capital.
”Witnesses reported seeing three or four girls hanging around in the lobby right before the fire,” the spokesperson said, adding that some of the 11 residents injured in the blaze were in such serious condition that the death toll would ”very probably” rise.
Many of the victims died after fleeing their homes and inhaling toxic smoke generated by temperatures that exceeded 300°C, said a fire officer, Alain Antonini. ”Those who stayed inside were fine,” he told French radio. ”It’s those who rushed out and ran into … the smoke and fumes who explain the terrible toll.”
The local mayor, Patrick Sève, said the blaze bore ”little relation” to the two other fires in central Paris that have killed 24 African immigrants over the past 10 days. Although police now suspect one of those blazes may also have been arson, both involved badly maintained, overcrowded, inner-city buildings between 100 and 150 years old.
The block that went up in flames on Sunday was a relatively modern ”HLM”, a low-cost council housing block built in the late 1970s. It held about 800 people in 110 apartments and had been recently renovated, Sève said.
Survivors described the screams of panicked residents and said some people had leapt from windows as the flames tore through the entrance hall and up the stairwell. Some youths had thrown stones at the firefighters, apparently angry at the length of time they took to arrive.
But rescue officials said the response was fast and some 160 firefighters had arrived at the scene within half an hour of the blaze being reported at just after 1am. The fire, which wrecked a number of apartments on the first three floors, was under control in 90 minutes and firefighters penetrated the building 26 times to rescue lower-floor residents. Those in the upper storeys were told to stay put with their doors firmly shut.
”There was smoke, and people were screaming and wanted to jump,” said one upper-floor resident, Claude Camps (48) who fled with his wife once the smoke had died down. ”When we finally came out, there was nothing left of the hallway.”
Florence Leclerc, who lives on the ground floor, said: ”There was a terrible panic. We saw the bodies of people we knew, our neighbours. A couple and their two children, a whole family just upstairs, are all dead.”
The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, who last week announced plans to build new public housing and evict squatters from blocks considered fire hazards, sent his ”sincere condolences”, and President Jacques Chirac, in hospital with sight problems, reportedly discussed the fire with a senior aide by phone.
Paris’s city hall has said the capital has about 60 unsafe squats and that more than 10 000 flats are unhygienic in the greater Paris region, where more that 300 000 families — many of them immigrants — are waiting for permanent social housing. – Guardian Unlimited Â