"I have just got back from the site and it was gutted. A ruin. Firemen were carrying away parts of the building to try to find out what happened," he said. "The mood here is so distraught. Some of the children who died were so young, too young to understand. They were just starting out in life. It is tragic. I met a man who lost two children and his wife in the blaze. He was speechless. But what is there to say? He had done his best to help them."
The Bild newspaper published a picture of a three-year-old standing beside his two-year-old brother in a buggy. "Kamil and Kenan. They have not survived," read the caption.
The fire
Germany has been awash with rumor and specu-lation about how the fire started. One young Turkish girl told the N24 television channel that she had seen a man setting fire to a stick near to the house. Someone injured in the blaze told ambulance staff there was a loud bang, like an explosion.
The tragedy has raised fears among Germany's Turkish community of a targeted attack, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has echoed their concerns. On Turkish television, he said the country did not want a repeat of 1993's firebomb attack on a house in Solingen, in the far west of Germany, in which five Turks were killed. "After the racist acts of violence in the past the question arises: was this fire an accident or not?" he said.
A delegation headed by State Minister Mustafa Said Yazicioglu would soon leave for Germany to hold talks about the fire, he added.
If it was arson, it may well have been a racially motivated attack, but at the moment, the shell of the building is at risk of caving in, hampering the investigating team's search for evidence. "The roof is being lifted off to take some weight away from the weak structure. It is essential for our work that the building doesn't collapse," a member of the local police force said. Turkey is also sending in a team of investigators to try to find out what happened.
"At the moment we don't even have a vague suspicion or lead about what might have caused this fire," admitted Simone Eisenbarth from the press center of the Ludwigshafen police. She said she had taken phone calls from across Europe.
The photographer
The image of the falling baby was taken by 43-year-old web designer and sport photographer Rene Werse, who happened to be walking past the platz after the carnival.
Werse, who had been taking pictures of the procession, snapped as the baby was mid-air. The picture was beamed worldwide by news agencies. He told a German web magazine how it slowly dawned on him what was happening.
"As I came past the house there was nothing to see, no smell of smoke, but then I saw lots of people on the balconies and at the windows. They were shouting and breaking through the windows," he said.
"The drama wasn't clear from the outside of the building, but rather from the people themselves. There was pure panic on their faces."
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