French police have arrested a 36-year-old man in connection with a building fire which had claimed the lives of eight people, including two children, in the early hours of yesterday morning.
The man was carrying a candle and a lighter, and had been sought in relation to some 20 cases involving drugs, vandalism and theft. He was detained on the basis of eyewitness testimony and a video surveillance camera 10m from the burned- out apartment building.
The building, on rue Myrha in the heavily immigrant 18th district, was still burning when interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve visited the site at 7am. He said criminal motives were the most likely explanation for the worst fire in Paris in a decade. He was joined by the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who said Paris was in mourning.
In 2005, some 50 people perished in fires in a rundown hotel and an apartment building where impoverished immigrants lived. But the fire early yesterday took place in a privately owned building that was in good condition.
There were, in fact, two fires. The first, a paper fire in the entrance, was reported at 2.23am and was quickly extinguished by 15 firemen who arrived in two trucks. When the firemen left, a witness reported seeing a white car with tinted windows carrying several men outside the building.
The second fire started at 4.30am. Norman Grandjean, a 30-year-old office worker who lives across the street, told TF1 television that he was woken by cries of “Help” and thought someone was being attacked. From his window, Mr Grandjean watched flames coming out of the third floor and desperate people screaming from their windows.
Tissem Ferjani, a pastry chef who lives in the same street, wept as she told TF1 inhabitants of the building “had no choice: either they stayed in their apartments and died or jumped out the windows”.
A hundred firemen took 3½ hours to put out the second fire. They tried to resuscitate two people who had jumped to the footpath, but both were dead. They found six people, including two children, who had died of asphyxiation on the third and fifth floors. They extricated seven survivors, four of whom were injured.
Both fires started on the ground floor, one in a letterbox. The second fire spread quickly up the open staircase.
Rue Myrha is in the Goutte- d’Or, a neighbourhood known for drug trafficking, where tensions have risen between the original Muslim population, tourists who rent apartments by the week and younger, more affluent residents attracted by low rents.
There were attacks on Muslims in the Goutte-d'Or after the Charlie Hebdo massacre last January, and Islamophobe tracts were distributed in letterboxes, Le Monde said.
In recent months, tourists reportedly taunted Muslims as they left prayers in the mosque in rue Myrha by throwing wine on them from upper floor windows. The mosque is one of the most attended in Paris.
