France: Apartment fire kills ten near Lyon

A fire outbreak that engulfed a residential building in Vaulx-en-Velin, an impoverished town near the south-eastern French city of Lyon has killed ten people.

Authorities say another four people were seriously injured in the blaze which started around 3 a.m. (0200 GMT) on Friday on the ground floor of a seven-storey building before spreading up. The flames were later extinguished.

Five children, aged three to 15, were among those killed in the early morning fire.

The Lyon prosecutor’s office opened an investigation to determine how the fire broke out and said it could not rule out any hypothesis including arson.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who visited the site of the fire on Friday, said there was drug dealing – and squatting by drug dealers – in several spots along that street, including within the building hit by the fire. Police had arrested drug dealers in that building overnight, he said.

“There had been reports of drug dealing but it’s too early to draw conclusions,” Darmanin said.

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Footage on social media showed a huge, dark cloud billowing above the building earlier in the day.

“I was woken up by the screams,” a neighbour, Mohamed, told Le Progres de Lyon daily. “We wanted to help people but the smoke was too thick.”

Other witnesses quoted by local media said a woman had tossed her child down to a crowd, which had gathered outside and managed to catch him. She then jumped out of the window to escape the fire and smoke and fell to her death.

Angry neighbours told media that they felt abandoned by public authorities, amid reports that the building hit by the fire had been in poor condition.

A third of Vaulx-en-Velin’s population lives under the poverty threshold, in what is one of France’s many high-rise areas hastily developed in the second half of the 20th century to fight a housing shortage and absorb waves of immigrants.

Reuters/Zainab Sa’id