FRANCE: Among the 17 charred bodies found in the smouldering shell of an apartment building in Paris's 13th district early yesterday were the remains of 14 children, one of them only a few months old.
Five of the dead children belonged to the same family.
Thirty other people were injured in the fire, two of them critically. About 30 adults and 100 children from Senegal and Mali lived in the 19th-century building. The survivors spent yesterday in a nearby gym, and were to sleep in hotels last night.
The fire broke out on the ground floor of the six-storey building shortly after midnight, Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin said. "It spiralled up through the wooden stairwell, and completely destroyed the top three floors." Mr Marin said it was not yet clear whether the fire was accidental or criminal. It took 210 firemen two hours to put out the blaze.
Jammey Saiagou, who had an apartment on the fourth floor, told Le Monde he managed to run out of the building and shouted up to his wife and children not to jump. "My wife put wet towels on the doors and she held on until the rescuers arrived. But I saw Diarra, a neighbour, jump from the third floor."
The inhabitants of the building were legal residents of France and paid rent. They complained of plumbing that leaked on to electrical wires, and the absence of light in the staircase. A net covered a wide crack down several floors of the facade.
In 1991, many of the same Africans camped for four months on the site of what is now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. They were promised permanent housing within three years.
The tragedy has reignited the debate over the poor conditions endured by many immigrants. Four months ago, 24 Africans, including 11 children, perished in a hotel fire near the Paris Opera.
But France Euro Habitat (Freha), a charitable group that managed the apartments, stressed that unlike the illegal immigrants who died in April, the victims of yesterday's fire "were tenants fully in their rights".
Jacques Oudot, the president of Freha, said: "We had a plan to totally rehabilitate the building, but it was stalled because no one wanted to relodge the inhabitants while the work was going on. Everything was ready, but the administration told us there was a housing shortage."
The city of Paris has 102,500 unfilled applications for low-income housing. A 2001 study by an anti-discrimination group said that, while 75 per cent of applicants obtain housing within six months, only 58 per cent of Africans succeed within the same time-frame.
President Jacques Chirac issued a statement saying: "All France mourns this terrible catastrophe. I bow with emotion before the dead."
Four high-ranking officials visited the scene of the fire. Jean-Louis Borloo, the minister for social cohesion and housing, was jeered by survivors shouting: "It's too late. It's too late. There's no point coming now."
A placard at an impromptu street protest yesterday evening said: "Borloo: when will you give us housing on the moon?"
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy was the first official to arrive, in the middle of the night. "The difficulty is that a whole lot of people, some of whom don't have papers, amass in Paris and there are not conditions to house them," he said. Mr Sarkozy asked the head of police to immediately draw up a list of "all buildings that could be dangerous in terms of fire or overcrowding".
The former junior minister for housing Marie-Noelle Linemann said she was surprised at this announcement because 400,000 insalubrious lodgings were recently identified in France.