Ten people including five children aged three to 15 have been killed in a fire at a residential building in a suburb of Lyon, reports The Guardian.
Fourteen people were injured, four of them seriously, in the fire in the small suburban town of Vaulx-en-Velin, one of the poorest parts of the French city.
The fire started on the ground floor of a seven-storey 1960s block of flats in the Mas du Taureau neighbourhood and reportedly spread fast to the upper floors, filling stairwells with smoke.
It was one of the deadliest such tragedies in a residential building in recent years, although France has seen a sequence of similar incidents.
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. It has since been extinguished.
The Lyon prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine how the fire broke out, and said it could not rule out any hypothesis, including that someone had started the fire deliberately.
“We do not know the cause of the fire … there are several scenarios and a probe will be opened,” the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told reporters in Paris before heading to the scene. “It’s shocking and the toll is extremely heavy,” he said, adding he had discussed what had happened with President Emmanuel Macron.
The housing minister, Olivier Klein, said he had spoken to the Vaulx-en-Velin mayor, Hélène Geoffroy, and would visit the city. “I am going there this morning to be alongside the residents, local officials and the emergency services,” he tweeted.
Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburban town of 43,000 inhabitants, is among the most impoverished areas in the Rhone region.
“I heard people shouting ‘help, help, help, help us’,” said Assed Belal, a young resident who was there during the fire. “There were people on the ground, others stuck on the balconies and the firefighters had difficulty in intervening because of the trees,” he told Agence France-Presse.