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Paris apartment fire kills 7

Third deadly blaze since April to hit city's immigrant community

Firemen worked about an hour to contain the latest Paris fire.

Gallery: Images from August 26 fire

• Paris immigrants living dangerously

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PARIS, France (CNN) -- Seven people were killed, including four children, when a fire ripped through a rundown Paris apartment building housing African immigrants, officials said Tuesday.

The overnight blaze was the second such fire in a week and the third to occur since April in buildings housing immigrants in the French capital. Combined, the three fires have killed 48 people.

The latest blaze started late Monday and burned a six-story building in the historic Marais district in the 3rd Arrondissment of central Paris, firefighters said.

Among those killed was a 6-year-old boy whose mother threw him out of a fifth-floor window to try to save him from the fire, The Associated Press quoted police as saying.

The bodies of the mother, who was pregnant, and a 3-year-old child were found in the building. On the same floor, firefighters also found a second family: a woman, who was pregnant with twins, her husband and their two children, police said, AP reported.

Two people were seriously injured in the blaze, and five firefighters were slightly hurt. About 130 firefighters struggled for about an hour to bring the fire under control.

French President Jacques Chirac issued a statement urging investigators to work hard to discover the fire's cause.

"To the families of the victims and those close to them, I express my most heartfelt condolences," AP quoted Chirac as saying.

District Mayor Pierre Aidenbaum said about a dozen families from the west African nation of Ivory Coast lived in the building, and that authorities knew the conditions were "unacceptable and dangerous."

The rundown building had been abandoned by its owner, and the city had intervened to have the building purchased about six months ago, AP reported the mayor as saying.

City authorities had started the process of finding a place to rehouse the families last month, he said.

Deputy Paris Mayor Yves Contassot put the number of families living in the building at about two dozen and said it had been taken over by squatters, AP reported.

Contassot said about half the families were illegal immigrants.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy ordered all havens for squatters shut down "because these are human beings housed in unacceptable conditions," AP quoted him as saying.

Elisabeth Sevre, who lived in a nearby building, told AP the tenants were living in "frightening conditions" and that she often saw them taking water from a spigot on the street.

On Friday, 14 children and three adults were killed in a blaze in southeastern Paris at a rundown apartment building that housed African immigrants. (Full story)

Four months earlier, 24 people died in a similar fire at a budget hotel where African immigrants lived. (Full story)

The fires have focused new attention on the plight of Paris' poor and sparked angry calls for action on behalf of the needy.

The country "can't accept that those who live on France's territory ... live in such conditions," former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur told RTL radio Tuesday.

"It's a basic humanitarian problem and it's time to take it seriously," AP quoted as saying.

Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist UDF party and a fierce government critic, told France 2 television: "This gives a real idea of the toughness of the society we live in, so the authorities should fulfil the undertakings it has made."

"We've been saying for a long time that we're going to intervene in these squats, in these numerous outdated buildings and that we were going to intervene to ensure that at least basic fire safety norms were respected," Reuters quoted Bayrou as saying.

"This is a problem of urban planning, of housing policy, of immigration, of people without residence permits, of misery, of exclusion all coming together," Bayrou said.

CNN's Jim Bittermann contributed to this report.

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