Two bodies were found in the rubble of a building that collapsed in Marseille following a major explosion, French authorities said early on Monday, as rescue workers scrambled to find at least six people still unaccounted for.
The discovery of the bodies came about 24 hours after the blast brought down the four-storey building in the Mediterranean port city in southern France.
Emergency workers had continued rescue operations through Sunday night into the early hours of Monday with the help of a crane and lights, but a persistent fire underneath the rubble hampered their work, making it difficult for firefighters to deploy sniffer dogs.
“Given the particular difficulties of intervention, the extraction [of the bodies from the site] will take time,” the fire department said in a statement announcing the bodies had been found.
“The judicial authority will then proceed to identify” the victims, it added.
Earlier on Sunday, before the discovery of the bodies, local prosecutor Dominique Laurens said eight people “were not responding to phone calls”.
Five people from neighbouring buildings sustained minor injuries in the blast and collapse, which occurred abot 1.40am on Sunday local time.
“Tonight, the pain and sorrow are great,” Marseille’s mayor, Benoit Payan, said in a statement. “All services of the city, as well as the state, are still at this very moment fully committed to continue the search.”
The cause of the explosion is still to be determined, but investigators are looking at the possibility it was the result of a gas leak.
More than 100 firefighters were battling the blaze in the ruins of the building, which was believed to have one apartment on each floor.
“We have nothing, not even an ID card. We have lost everything,” said a man who gave his name as Roland in an interview with local newspaper La Provence. He managed to get out of the building on 15 Rue de Tivoli with his wife and two children before it collapsed, together with a neighbouring building, after the explosion around 12.40am local time. A third building partly collapsed.
Five people were taken to hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries. The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, who visited the site, said 30 buildings in the area were evacuated.
Saveria Mosnier, who lives in a street near the site in the La Plaine neighbourhood, said: “I was sleeping and there was this huge blast that really shook the room. I was shocked awake as if I had been dreaming.
“We very quickly smelled a strong gas odour that hung around. We could still smell it this morning.”
It was unclear how many people were inside the collapsed buildings . “Not all the people who were supposedly inside … have been seen. Families are worried,” the French housing minister, Olivier Klein, told the broadcaster Franceinfo.
Christophe Mirmand, the prefect of the southern Bouches-du-Rhône region, said: “We have to be very cautious about what the cause was at this stage.” Gas was “one possible option”.
Gilles, who lives on a sidestreet near the building, told AFP the sound of the crash “was huge”. “It sounded like an explosion,” he said, declining to provide his last name.
Almost 200 residents were evacuated and 50 requested to be urgently rehoused. An aid centre for people looking for missing family members or loved ones has been opened in a neighbouring district.
Eight were killed in Marseille in 2018 when two dilapidated buildings in the working-class district of Noailles caved in. It cast a harsh light on the city’s housing standards, with aid groups saying 40,000 people live in shoddy structures.
But authorities appeared to rule out structural issues in the latest collapse, in a neighbourhood known for its bars and nightlife. “There was no danger notice for this building, and it is not in a neighbourhood identified as having substandard housing,” said Mirmand.
Further back in Marseille’s history, eight people were killed in a building collapse in 1981, five in an explosion in 1985, and four in a 1996 gas blast that demolished a seven-storey building.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report