The fire may have started from a malfunctioning clothes dryer in the home. (Document)
Lille, France:
Police and firefighters say a mother and seven children aged 2 to 14 have died after the fire broke out while they were sleeping in their home in northern France on Monday.
The raging blaze, the deadliest fire in France in a decade, broke out shortly after midnight at a family home in the town of Charly-sur-Marne, about 80 kilometers east of Paris.
Local prosecutor Julien Morino-Ros told AFP the mother and her children died of asphyxiation.
He said the cause of the fire could be a clothes dryer on the ground floor of the house that was malfunctioning.
Neighbors called the fire department to report the fire just before 1 a.m. (00:00 GMT).
The woman’s husband, the father of three, suffered severe burns and was taken to hospital.
His life was saved by a firefighter who lived nearby, who intervened before his colleagues arrived.
The children include five girls and two boys. Four of them were from the mother’s previous relationship.
Prosecutors said the father appeared to have tried to put out the fire while the children and their mother sought refuge from the blaze on the second floor of the house, but that action turned out to be a trap.
While black smoke filled the house, firefighters had trouble getting ladders to the top windows of the house, which is nestled in a narrow street in the center of a village of 2,600 residents.
He said the house’s power window shutters were locked due to a power outage, further hampering rescue efforts.
Local authorities said a total of 80 firefighters were called to the scene and the blaze was extinguished within hours.
The tragedy is the worst since 2013, when five children aged 2 to 9 suffocated in an accidental fire, also in northern France.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
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