An explosion tore apart two buildings in Marseille in the early hours of Sunday.
Paris:
Eight people are not responding to calls and are believed to be buried under the rubble of two buildings that collapsed in an explosion in the southern French city of Marseille early Sunday, local officials said.
Marseille prosecutor Dominique Laurens said the cause of the explosion was not yet known.
He told a news conference that the collapse caused a fire that has complicated rescue efforts and investigations and has not been brought under control.
Television footage showed clouds of smoke rising from the wreckage as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze, while trained dogs tried to locate the victims.
“We have nothing, not even an ID card. We have lost everything,” said one man in an interview with local newspaper La Provence. He managed to escape from the building at 15 Rue de Tivoli with his wife and two children before it collapsed along with a neighboring building.
A third building partially collapsed.
Five people were taken to the hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who visited the scene, said 30 buildings in the area had been evacuated.
In 2018, about 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) from the tragedy, three buildings deemed unfit for habitation collapsed, killing eight people.
The mayor of Marseille said a parallel could not be drawn, while the prosecutor said there were no structural problems with the buildings that collapsed on Sunday.
“Thoughts are with Marseille,” President Emmanuel Macron said in a Twitter message.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)