Some 1,500 people, according to the gendarmerie, marched on Saturday February 11 in Charly-sur-Marne (Aisne) during a white march organized in tribute to a mother and her seven children killed on Monday in the fire of their house.
Equipped with white flowers, balloons and children's drawings, the participants gathered with emotion in this wine-growing town of 2,600 inhabitants, where the bells rang at 2 p.m. for a long quarter of an hour.
The participants, family and loved ones in the lead, walked through the city in silence, before marking a long moment of meditation in front of the burnt house.
People walk past the house that burned down five days earlier in Charly-sur-Marne.
FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI / AFP
The procession, which left the college where some of the victims were educated, also passed near the establishments - kindergarten and elementary - of the youngest children.
The victims - five girls, two boys aged between two and 14, as well as their mother - died of asphyxiation.
“
The bodies were not calcined
,” Soissons prosecutor Julien Morino-Ros told AFP.
“
It is a priori a dryer that caught fire on the ground floor.
»
The father of this blended family, the only survivor of the disaster, aged 40, was hospitalized for second-degree burns and was heard on Monday.
He said he “
perceived a burning smell, then noticed thick smoke coming from the ground floor
,” according to a statement from the prosecutor.
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The investigation, carried out by the research brigade of Château-Thierry, will have to determine in particular how the dryer, "
completely calcined
", started the fire, had specified Julien Morino-Ros.
This drama is the deadliest involving children since a fire in 2013 in Saint-Quentin (Aisne) which killed five people aged two to nine.