Another Paris blaze claims 17 lives

Fourteen and three adults -- one of whom was a pregnant woman -- died yesterday in an inferno that gutted a Paris apartment block housing African immigrant families as horrified neighbors heard the youngsters screaming for help, witnesses and officials said.

The blaze, one of the worst in the capital since the end of World War II, swept up the stairwell of the 105-year-old building in the 13th district in the southeast of the French capital.

"It was horrible to hear the children's screams," Oumar Cisse, the building's supervisor, told reporters outside the address, on a boulevard busy during the daytime.

He and firemen said some of the panicked residents jumped from their windows before firecrews arrived with ladders.

Officials the building housed 12 families mostly from Mali, but also from Senegal, Ivory Coast and Gambia at the time the fire broke out. Of the 130 residents, 100 were children, they said. As well as the 17 killed, another 30 were injured. The Red Cross said one family lost four of its six children in the tragedy.

An had begun into the cause of the blaze. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he had ordered Paris authorities to check all buildings in the capital that could be fire hazards.

Other officials expressed shock at the tragedy.

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe declared the fire "a horrible tragedy."

"It's another especially painful moment for Paris," he said after meeting survivors.

More 200 firemen fought the blaze for three hours from midnight, finally extinguishing it just before 3am. One of the first fire officers on the scene, Corporal Sebastien Figeac, said women were screaming and people could be seen at the windows of the building.

"Our first priority was to save a man on a window ledge. One person had already jumped out of a window before we arrived," Figeac, 24, said.

"In a shower we found a pregnant woman unconscious who had gone there to protect herself," he said.

In another apartment, the men found "a carbonized child." Another contained 10 people still alive.

A fire brigade spokesman said "the stairwell was immediately burnt out, that's why the people took to the windows." Most of the victims were asphyxiated, he said.

Residents the building was dilapidated, with cracks in the walls, rats running loose, and the sizeable families crowding into small apartments, often 12 at a time. The wooden staircase creaked and shook every time it was used, they said.