A strong explosion ignited a blaze in central Paris on Wednesday that sent smoke soaring over the domed Pantheon monument and prompted the evacuation of buildings in the neighbourhood. Officials said 33 people were injured, four of them critically, while two more were missing.
The explosion hit a design school popular with foreign students in the French capital's 5th arrondissment, or district, on the edge of the Latin Quarter, causing the building to collapse.
Rescue workers were in the evening still searching the rubble for two missing individuals who had not been accounted for, according to French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
He told reporters at the scene that four seriously injured victims were in a life-threatening condition, while 33 others had sustained lesser injuries.
Florence Berthout, the mayor of the arrondissement, spoke of an "extremely violent" blast, describing pieces of glass still falling from buildings.
Police spokeswoman Loubna Atta said it was too early to determine the source of the fire and could not confirm reports it was caused by a gas explosion.
Television images showed rubble from the Paris American Academy strewn across the Rue Saint-Jacques and smoke rising from at least two nearby buildings that were ablaze.
"I heard a huge explosion," local bar employee Khal Ilsey told Reuters. "And as I was leaving the restaurant, I saw flames at the end of Rue Saint-Jacques."
The blast occurred at 4:55 pm local time (1455 GMT), just as workers were heading home. Some 70 fire trucks and 270 firefighters were involved in the emergency response.
Firefighters could be seen manning hoses and aiming jets of water at the blaze while a plume of thick black smoke billowed into the sky.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo assembled a crisis unit and wrote on Twitter: "My thoughts go first and foremost to the victims and their loved ones."
Rue Saint-Jacques leads from Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Sorbonne University and the Val de Grace, a few blocks from the popular Jardin du Luxembourg.
The area is usually packed with tourists and foreign students in the early summer.
"I was at home writing... I thought it was a bomb," said art historian Monique Mosser, adding that many of the windows in her building had been blown out by the blast's shock wave.
"A neighbour knocked on the door and told me that the fire brigade were asking us to evacuate as quickly as possible," Mosser added. "I grabbed my laptop, my phone. I didn't even think to take my medication."
The explosion recalled a massive blast that rocked Paris in January 2019, when a suspected leak in a buried gas pipe destroyed a building on the Rue de Trevise in the ninth district, killing four people including two firefighters.
The shockwave blew out scores of nearby windows, and dozens of families were forced to evacuate their homes for months. Much of the street still remains off limits four years after the disaster.
(FRANCE 24 with AP, Reuters, AFP)
