A blaze in a rundown building housing African immigrants in Paris - the second in four days - killed seven people overnight, officials said Tuesday, deepening a sense of shock over the plight of France's impoverished non-citizens.
Officials said four children and three adults died after the blaze broke out in the stairwell of the dilapidated five-storey tenement they were squatting.
The fire occurred in the Marais, a historic central district popular with tourists, at 10:00 pm (2000 GMT) Monday.
One of the children died after jumping from a fourth-floor window, firefighters said. "I heard an explosion, then I saw the flames and heard the screams," said a survivor with a baby in her arms who gave her name as Karamoko.
"The fire raced to the top. On the fourth floor, there were pregnant women. One threw her six-year-old child out the window. After, I saw a man rush through a window and splat below," she said.
Another woman, Tata, said she saw her husband jump, naked, from the first floor. He was taken to hospital suffering burns and other injuries.
The mayor of the district, Pierre Aidenbaum, said 12 families comprising 40 illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast had been living in the building, which was owned by the municipality and scheduled to be entirely renovated. "For years people had been saying the living conditions there were dreadful," he said.
More than 100 firefighters battled for an hour and a half to extinguish the flames, which police said they believed were caused by faulty wiring apparently installed by the residents themselves.
The street in front of the building was blocked off on Tuesday as police and municipal authorities tried to calm the distraught residents, who insisted on staying in front of the premises until new lodgings were found. Some of the women sat on the ground, tears rolling down their faces.
President Jacques Chirac ordered investigators "to diligently determine the exact circumstance of this tragedy" and expressed his "horror and condolences" to the families of the victims. Chirac added that the government would "make strong initiatives very soon" to avoid similar blazes in the future.
The Ivory Coast ambassador to France, Yacinthe Kouassi, said he was "shocked" by the fire and called on French authorities to give residency papers to immigrants.
"I appeal to them, as a cry from the heart: All this has to stop and they have to see how they can give papers to people," he said.
Civil rights groups called demonstrations to push the same demand and to call for decent lodgings for immigrants. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe visited the survivors, who were initially taken to a nearby hotel, and said the city had "a very serious problem with insalubrious buildings." He appealed to authorities in surrounding regions and the nation as a whole to become aware of the issue to help shoulder the burden of sheltering poor people.
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