THREE people were under arrest yesterday after a fire at a home for asylum seekers in the northern German city of Luebeck left at least 10 dead and 20 seriously injured, was Denis Staunton from Berlin.
Police were last night still investigating the cause of the fire, which started shortly before 4 a.m. yesterday. But officials said that the speed with which it spread through the house suggested that it may have been started deliberately.
"We are investigating in every direction. Everything from a technical fault to an arson attack is thinkable", said Mr Winfried Tabarelli, a police spokesman.
The three suspects, all from the neighbouring eastern state of Mecklenburg, were seen running away from the building shortly after the fire broke out. Witnesses said that one had short hair and was dressed like a skinhead.
Lueheck's synagogue was the target of two arson attacks during the past two years, the first attacks on a synagogue in Germany since the Nazi era. Four young men were jailed for between two and five years for one of these attacks.
The town of Moelln, less than 20 km away, was the scene of one of the worst racist attacks seen in Germany since the country was reunited in 1990. On the night of November 23rd, 1993, two Turkish women and one young girl died in a fire at their home. One man was sentenced to life imprisonment for the attack and his accomplice was jailed for 10 years.
The people of Lueheck were insisting yesterday that the fire could have happened anywhere in German, and Ms Heide Simonis prime minister of Schleswig Holstein, claimed that it was unfair to brand local people as racists.