Police prepare to evacuate rundown buildings

Police were today preparing to evacuate Paris’ most dilapidated apartment buildings and squats, a response to three deadly fires that killed 48 African immigrants in recent months.

Paris police headquarters launched the emergency measures yesterday, hours after seven Africans – including four children – died as flames tore through a squat in the heart of the capital. One six-year-old victim died after his desperate mother threw him from a fifth-floor window.

In response, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy ordered all havens for squatters to be shut down.

Police said yesterday they had already evacuated one building in northern Paris, but only one person was staying there at the time.

Firefighters will also visit run-down buildings and install fire alarms if needed, police said in a statement.

Housing Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said funding new lodgings for those evacuated was not a problem.

“Money is not an issue in this affair,” he told France-Info radio. “We just have organisation problems, problems with speed. This takes time and it’s complex.”

“It’s out of the question to leave these people in a situation of vital risk,” he said.

The fire late on Monday was around the corner from the Picasso Museum in the historic Marais district – hitting home the reality that rundown housing exists even in one of Paris’ highest-rent districts.

The fire started on the first floor of the building that was home to between 40 and 60 people from the Ivory Coast, about half of them in France illegally, police and city officials said.

Police said they believed the fire was accidental, noting numerous fire hazards. Residents had pirated electricity from a nearby building. Gas cylinders and mattresses cluttered the floors and had fuelled the flames, police said.

The deaths have focused attention on the plight of France’s growing immigrant populations – and the precarious conditions in which an estimated 2 million people live in France.

Only days earlier, another Paris fire killed 17 African immigrants, including 14 children. In that fire, officials ruled out an electrical short circuit, and raised the possibility that the blaze was caused by human action, suggesting arson or an accident.

In April, 24 people died in a fire at a budget hotel that housed African immigrants near Paris’ old Opera house.