Fifteen people, including at least three children, were killed and more than 30 injured in an apartment block fire in a southern Paris suburb early Sunday - the third fatal fire to hit the French capital in nine days.
The blaze broke out at around 1:00 am (2300 GMT Saturday) in the hall of an 18-storey high-rise containing some 110 local authority flats at L'Hay-les-Roses near Orly airport. The casualties - including 11 who were seriously injured - were all caused by smoke inhalation.
Police said the origin of the fire appeared to be criminal, and late afternoon they announced that three girls aged between 16 and 18, two of whom lived in the building, were being held for questioning. Police said they did yet have evidence linking the girls to starting the fire.
Residents told investigators that vandals had been spotted setting light to letter-boxes on the ground floor of the high-rise. Low-level arson attacks on cars and property are a regular problem in run-down housing estates that surround many French cities.
Police raised the death toll from the fire to 15 on Sunday evening, but did not immediately release information on the victim's age.
Altogether 39 people have been killed in three fires in Paris in little over a week, but authorities were at pains to play down any similarity between the latest disaster and the fires on August 26 and 29 which killed 24 African immigrants in two dilapidated Paris buildings.
"This is a block of flats. It's got nothing to do with the fires in the Paris squats," said fire service spokesman Michel Cros.
Several African families were among the 500 people living in the high-rise, which is in a working-class neighbourhood with no particular reputation for trouble.
The blaze sent long flames licking up the outside of the building, while smoke billowed up the stairwell - fanned by the airflow as residents opened their doors in panic. On a hot night most windows were open.
Rescue workers found victims in the stairwell at the very top of the building, while lower down residents were safe who stayed in their apartments and sealed their doors with material.
"The smoke woke me. My bedroom was full of it. It stuck to the skin, it was suffocating," said Jean, a first floor resident who called the fire brigade. "There were people who wanted to hurl themselves from their windows, but I told them not to - that the emergency services were coming."
"There was total panic, because we saw the bodies of people we knew. Our neighbours - a couple and their child, an entire family - are dead," said Florence Leclerc.
Some 160 fire-fighters were dispatched to the scene, and the fire was brought under control after two hours. One young woman resident gave birth in an ambulance brought to the scene.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin issued a statement expressing his "condolences ... and the firm support of the state," while Social Cohesion Minister Jean-Louis Borloo left a ruling party conference at La Baule on the Atlantic coast to be at the scene.
The question of safe and affordable housing for immigrants moved to the top of the political agenda after the recent fires, which followed an earlier conflagration in a city centre hotel in April which killed 24 Africans.
Police believe the fire which killed 17 Malians near Austerlitz station on August 26 may have been set deliberately, but last Monday's at a squat in the fashionable Marais district was almost certainly an accident.
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