A huge apartment block fire in Paris has killed at least eight people, including two children.
It took more than 100 firefighters to extinguish the blaze, which broke out at a fire-storey building at the base of the hill at Montmartre early on Wednesday morning, and four survivors were being treated in hospital.
Witnesses described seeing people at the building's upper windows screaming "Save us!" as the fire took hold below. Some victims leapt from the building and were killed by the fall.
A spokesman for the interior ministry told a local TV channel that officials suspect the fire may have been started deliberately.
incendie 4 rue Myrha, les pompiers y étaient déjà intervenus 2 h 30 auparavant #GouttedOr #Paris18 #incendie pic.twitter.com/252QB21oSC
— Jean-Raphaël Bourge (@jrbourge) September 2, 2015
Firefighters were called to the same building to extinguish a small paper fire earlier on Wednesday morning. Just two hours later, another fire began in a ground floor stairwell and quickly engulfed the whole block.
The fire is one of the worst in the city for a decade, since the 2005 fire in a hotel housing African immigrants which left 24 dead, including 11 children.
A firefighter works at the scene where a fire in an apartment building in the north of Paris killed eight people (AFP)
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, who was on the scene of the fire with interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, said the building in the eighteenth arrondissement of the north of the city had been in a good condition before the fire.
Mr Cazeneuve confirmed that a criminal investigation was underway, but said it was "too early to determine the causes of this tragedy".
