Paris immigrant housing blaze leaves 17 dead

A FIRE at a crowded Paris apartment building housing African immigrants early yesterday killed 17 people - 14 of them children.

The blaze began after midnight under the ground-floor stairwell of the seven-storey building on the corner of a major boulevard in southeast Paris and raged for three hours, injuring 23 people, said prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin.

It was the second deadly blaze in four months at buildings housing immigrants. In April, a fire at a budget Paris hotel killed 24 people, also mostly African and many of them children.