Ten people, including five children, were killed - according to a provisional death toll - after a fire broke out on Friday morning at a residential building in Vaulx-en-Velin, near the French city of Lyon, said the local authority.
The local authority for the Lyon/Rhone region said the cause of the fire was not known at this stage. Around 170 firefighters were at the site.
French prosecutors are investigating the source of a pre-dawn blaze that killed 10 people, including five children, in a dilapidated seven-storey block of flats in a Lyon suburb.
The country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said at the scene of the fire on an estate in Vaulx-en-Velin that it was too early to draw conclusions about the cause, but acknowledged the building housed a squat and was a known drug dealers’ hangout.
Darmanin praised the work of firefighters, who he said arrived 12 minutes after being alerted soon after 3am and “were able to save 15 people by taking considerable risks to their own lives, scaling the building from the outside … saving children and babies”.
Nineteen people were injured in the blaze, including four who were still in a critical condition in hospital, authorities said, and about 100 residents were having to be rehoused. The five children who died were aged between three and 15.
The fire started on the ground floor of a seven-storey, privately owned 1960s block of flats in the Mas du Taureau district of Vaulx-en-Velin, one of Lyon’s poorer suburbs, and spread rapidly to the upper floors, filling the stairwells with smoke.
Witnesses described panicked occupants of the building screaming for help as smoke billowed from the windows. “I heard people shouting ‘help, help, help, help us’,” said Assed Belal, a young resident of the neighbourhood.
“There were people on the ground, others stuck on the balconies and the firefighters had difficulty in intervening because of the trees,” Belal told Agence France-Presse. “We all know each other, it’s really terrible – I don’t have the words.”
He said friends had told him they managed to catch a 10-year-old boy dropped from an upper floor by his mother. Another witness, Mohamed, told local media he was woken by screams. “We wanted to help people, but the smoke was too thick,” he said.
The fire was first reported to emergency services at 3.12am, and by 3.25am about 170 firefighters and 65 fire trucks were at the site. Two of the 170 firefighters at the scene suffered light injuries while fighting the flames.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office said it was not ruling out any hypothesis, including arson. Darmanin said several residents had previously complained to local authorities about drug dealing and squatters in the building.
“The police pressure on dealing locations is daily, but unfortunately drugs are deeply entrenched in some areas of the country,” he said, adding that drug dealers had been arrested near the building on Thursday night, hours before the fire started.
Residents were evacuated to a nearby municipal building, and the education authority said psychologists would visit two local schools on Friday to provide counselling. Vaulx-en-Velin’s mayor, Hélène Geoffroy, said municipal, regional and national authorities were working to provide relief “at this very difficult moment”.
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Vaulx-en-Velin, a former industrial area about 5km north of the wealthy centre of Lyon, has a population of 43,000, including a large number of immigrant families. A third of the town’s residents live below the poverty threshold.
Dotted with public housing blocks, it was the scene of riots in 1990 sparked by the death of a youth hit by a police car. In the early 2000s, city authorities launched a €100m programme to revamp the area into a so-called “eco-district”.
The housing minister, Olivier Klein, who also visited the scene, said the building that caught fire had undergone emergency repairs in 2019 but was noted as “rundown” by Lyon authorities, who had earmarked it for renovation work in January.
A local opposition politician, Alexandre Vincendet, said the tragedy should “encourage us to be more proactive as regards the safety of collective housing” and demanded a fire risk survey be carried out of all blocks of flats in the town.
France has suffered several deadly fires in recent decades. In February 2019, 10 people were killed and 96 wounded in a fire in Paris. In 2005, also in the capital, 24 people were killed in a fire in a residential home used by families of African origin.
A woman was subsequently jailed for starting the fire by throwing clothes on candles during an argument.