Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- A fire that started last night in an apartment building housing low-income families in a southern suburb of Paris killed 12 people, including two children, and injured 15.

The fire is the third in less than two weeks in and around the French capital. On August 26, a blaze in a building housing African families killed 17 people. Four days later, seven immigrants lost their lives in a blaze in the centrally located Marais neighborhood. Fires in buildings in Paris and its environs have killed 44 people and injured 100 this year.

The latest blaze, which started at about 1:00 a.m. in the mail boxes on the ground floor of an 18-story building in L'Ha- les-Roses, spread through the building, asphyxiating people, town hall spokeswoman Mireille Mura said in a telephone interview.

``The conditions of this fire are not the same as the one that took place in Paris,'' Mura said. ``The mail boxes started burning, filling the staircase with smoke. People left their flats when they should have locked themselves inside.''

Firemen arrived on the scene shortly after they were called, at about 1:10 a.m., and it took them about two hours to control the fire, she said. An investigation has been opened, said a Paris Prefecture spokesman who declined to be named.

A majority of the buildings in Paris, built between the 17th and the 19th centuries, have between five and seven stories. To conserve the French capital's uniform skyline, buildings in the city cannot top 37 meters. A majority of the low-income families, living on the outskirts of Paris, are housed in taller buildings dating from the 1960s and 1970s.

Protest March

Between 5,000 and 10,000 people took to the street yesterday in Paris to protest what they said was the government's inability to provide adequate housing for people, mainly immigrants, who occupy buildings in the French capital, Le Parisien reported.

The march started at Boulevard Vincent-Auriol, on the left bank of the Seine, near the site of the Aug. 26 fire and ended at Place de Chatelet, near the building that burned down four days later, Le Parisien said.

Protesters were demanding better living conditions and calling on the government to requisition empty buildings to house families in need, the newspaper reported. They were also protesting the eviction of several African families on the morning of Sept. 2, when the Paris police emptied two squats in the 9th and 14th districts of the city, Le Parisien said.

``Once you accept all these people, to whom, unfortunately, you can't offer either jobs or housing, you end up with catastrophes like this,'' Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said after the Aug. 30 fire, speaking in the city of Reims, where he was accompanying Chirac. ``We're going to close down all these squats and buildings.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Gabriele Parussini in Paris at gparussini@bloomberg.net .