PARIS, Aug 30: A blaze in a rundown building housing African immigrants in Paris — the second in four days and the third in five months — killed seven people overnight and blew up into a public debate over housing for the poor and the government’s crackdown on illegal nationals.

Police said it appeared the blaze in the dilapidated five-storey building in the central Marais district had started accidentally in the wooden stairwell, probably from ad hoc electrical wiring set up by some of the 40 illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast who had been using it as a squat.

“I heard an explosion, then I saw the flames and heard the screams,” said a survivor with a baby in her arms who gave her name as Karamoko.

“The fire raced to the top. On the fourth floor, there were pregnant women. One threw her six-year-old child out the window. After, I saw a man rush through a window,” she said.

The six-year-old died of injuries sustained in the fall. The bodies of most of the other victims were found on the fourth floor of the building. Fourteen people were injured, two of them seriously.

“The fire was extremely violent. It destroyed the stairwell, which of course hampered their exit and slowed us getting to the upper floors,” said a police official, Jean-Jacques Herlem.

The tragedy came after a similar fire last Friday in a rundown apartment block in the city’s southeast in which 14 children and three adults, all registered African immigrants, died. The cause of that blaze, which also started in a stairwell, was being probed.

In April, another blaze raced through a dingy hotel close to the old opera and the main department stores, killing 24 Africans who were in France without valid papers. That fire was allegedly started accidentally by the girlfriend of the supervisor lighting candles in his apartment.

The mayor of the Paris district where the latest fire took place, Pierre Aidenbaum, said 12 families had been living in the building, which was owned by the municipality and scheduled to be entirely renovated as part of an effort to rid Paris of insalubrious housing stock.

President Jacques Chirac expressed his ‘horror’ at the fire and ordered investigators ‘to diligently determine the exact circumstance of this tragedy’.

He added that his government would ‘make strong initiatives very soon’ to prevent similar tragedies.

His hardline interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said the country’s lenient policy towards illegal immigrants was to blame.

“By accepting these people who, unfortunately, we can’t offer work or housing, we find ourselves in a situation where we have these tragedies,” he told France Inter radio.

“All these squats and all these buildings have to be closed to stop these tragedies and that’s what I’ve asked the police commissioner to do because we’re talking about human beings living in unacceptable conditions,” he said.

The Ivory Coast ambassador to France, Yacinthe Kouassi, visited the site and said he was ‘shocked’ by the fire and made ‘a cry from the heart’ to French authorities to give residency papers to immigrants forced into insalubrious lodgings because they lacked papers and money.

Civil rights groups and immigrant associations called demonstrations to push the same demand and to call for decent lodgings for immigrants.

“Enough of this hypocritical compassion,” said one of the groups, SOS Racisme. “This new tragedy shows the urgency of addressing the issue of low-cost housing.”

With the public’s attention focused on the fires and the debate it has engendered, the opposition Socialist party which runs Paris City Hall and members of Chirac’s ruling conservative party sought to shift responsibility to the other.

“For three years now, the government has meticulously dismantled the tools and financing for low-cost housing,” the Socialists said in a statement, adding that ‘housing policy must be a national policy’.

Claude Goasguen and Philippe Goujon, two senior officials of Chirac’s UMP party for the Paris region, countered with their own statement which said: “The welfare accommodation policy of the City of Paris, which refuses to build new low-cost housing, has reached its limits.”

According to one charity, the Abbe Pierre Foundation, more than three million people out of France’s population of 60 million live without basic amenities such as running water, toilets or heating.

The newspaper Le Monde called public authorities ‘powerless’ and said the problem was being exacerbated by a property bubble which was forcing house prices up — and relegating immigrants to lodgings unfit for habitation.—AFP