FranceAt least 20 people, including 10 children, died and more than 50 were injured yesterday when a fire swept through a hotel in central Paris used mainly by backpackers and newly arrived immigrants.
A city police spokesman said the death toll from the worst blaze in Paris in 30 years could rise because 11 of the injured - who included US, Portuguese, Senegalese, Ivorian, Tunisian and Ukrainian citizens - were in a "very serious" condition.
Eyewitnesses said some victims screamed for help from the windows as flames tore through the six-storey, one-star Paris-Opera hotel behind the Galeries Lafayette department store before dawn. Others climbed on to the roof, and some threw themselves from upper floors on to the street.
Seven of those who jumped subsequently died, said Laurent Vibert, a fire service spokesman.
"You don't often see such fires in Paris. There was only one staircase and the fire broke out on the lower floors. There was no explosion," Mr Vibert said.
The blaze was believed to have started in a first-floor breakfast room at about 2.20am, he said.
The cosmetics department of Galeries Lafayette was transformed into an emergency medical centre to treat the wounded before they were taken hospital.
Eight hours after the fire was brought under control, smoke could still be seen seeping from the blackened windows of the hotel's top two floors.
Chakib San, a neighbour, told a radio station that he had been awakened by screaming at about 2.30am. "I ran into the street just in time to see three people, including a young child, jump from a window," he said.
"They hit the ground with a terrible thump and lay without moving. Everyone was screaming; there were bodies in the road. I got a ladder with a woman from the next-door hotel and we managed to get a little girl out from one window before the fire brigade arrived." About 300 firefighters and emergency workers were called to the blaze, along with more than 50 fire engines and eight ambulances, officials said.
President Jacques Chirac expressed horror at the tragedy, and the interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, visited the scene.
Many of the 79 people staying in the hotel were African: Paris city hall, various social services departments and two charities had rented rooms there to provide temporary accommodation for immigrant families, the mayor of the city's 9th arrondissement said.
Prostitutes who work in some of the district's small cheap hotels were among the first on the scene. A woman who identified herself as Laure told the media that she had helped at least three people out of a window.
Christophe Varenne, the chief of the Paris fire brigade, said the death toll would have been "a very great deal lower" if the residents had not jumped out of the hotel's windows.
The Paris public prosecutor said a manslaughter investigation had begun.