Lyon tower block fire kills ten, including five children

Ten people have died including five children after a fire tore through an apartment block in France in the early hours of this morning. 

The blaze broke out a little after 3am local time in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon, in a ground floor apartment of a block of flats and quickly spread upwards.

Fourteen people were also injured in the inferno, with four now in serious condition in hospital. Two firefighters were hurt, but not seriously.

The children who died are aged between three and 15 years old, according to French interior minister Gérald Darmanin, who described the news as a ‘shock’.

Witnesses described how one woman threw her child out of a burning apartment window to a crowd below, who managed to catch the infant.

But then the woman herself jumped, and fell to her death.

Local authorities said they are ruling nothing out in their investigations, including that the fire may have been started deliberately.

Neighbours said that squatters – possibly drug dealers – had lived on the ground floor of the building.

Mr Darmanin said he was awake throughout the night giving updates on the situation to President Emmanuel Macron, and will visit the site of the fire today.

Asked about the cause of the blaze, he told French news station BFMTV that ‘several hypotheses’ are possible and an investigation is underway. 

A witness told the news station: ‘We heard screams, children screaming. When we opened the windows, we saw smoke coming out and suddenly we went downstairs.

‘Neighbors came with a ladder, we were still able to evacuate people who live on the first floor, on the garden side.’

Another said: ‘[I heard] a dad who cried my children, save my children help my children’

Some 165 firefighters and 70 vehicles were sent to fight the fire in total. The exact cause of the blaze, which took four hours to extinguish, is currently unknown.

The building where the fire happened has seven stories in total, plus a basement.

It is located in the Mas du Taureau district of Lyon, once considered one of the city’s most-deprived, but has been the subject of a recent regeneration plan.

Starting in the early 2000s, Lyon invested large sums of money to improve local shops and public transport links, according to Le Monde.

However, locals told journalists that conditions in the neighbourhood are still poor and that many people there feel abandoned.