Marseille: nearly 80 people evacuated from a migrant squat after a fire

Nearly 80 people, mostly migrants, were evacuated on Monday morning by firefighters after a fire in a squat occupied for more than a year in Marseille, we learned from concordant sources.

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Since December 2018, families of migrants and unaccompanied minors (MNA) have been welcomed voluntarily by associations in this large three-storey building, a former building of the diocese. Monday morning, help was called at 7:00 am to the Saint-Just squat "for a significant release of smoke," said Marseille firefighters to AFP. The fire started on the ground floor of the building, they said, without having yet determined the origin of the fire.

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The firefighters evacuated and secured 75 people, including children, who they then examined. "At present, there are no victims, no inconvenienced person , " they said. "It is terrible, but fortunately it did not happen in the middle of the night otherwise there would have been victims," reacted Mami, a social worker at the squat, contacted by telephone by AFP. "It's the end of Saint-Just, we never thought it would end like this," he added, visibly moved. Like other volunteers, he had a "blow to the heart" when he saw the inhabitants of the squat leave in metropolitan buses.

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Two metropolitan buses transported the homeless migrants to a gymnasium in the north of the city. The Saint-Just squat, which accommodated up to 350 people, had recently seen the departure of many of its occupants, foreign minors relocated by the services of the department.

After having been sentenced twice by the courts in April and May, the Bouches-du-Rhône departmental council had taken charge of part of the unaccompanied minors present at the squat. The court had indeed estimated that in the midst of a coronavirus epidemic, these young people, entrusted to child welfare by a judge, had no place in a squat with substandard living conditions.

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