A woman and her daughter were found dead in their apartment on Thursday in Elne (Pyrénées-Orientales) indicates L'Indépendant.
The firefighters were called at the end of the afternoon for a fire in a small building in this town located about ten kilometers from Perpignan.
When they arrived, they quickly contained the fire which had caused little damage.
Upon entering an apartment on the first floor, they discovered the two bodies, a 26-year-old woman and her three-year-old child.
“The body of the young mother was partially charred,” the public prosecutor told Le Parisien.
“Children from the village”
Relatives of the victims, worried about having no news of the young woman, who lived alone with her child, went to the scene in the afternoon.
One of them would have alerted the firefighters after noticing a smell of smoke emanating from the locked apartment.
Thursday evening, many of them went to the scene of the tragedy.
“They are children from the village, the parents have always lived here, the grandparents too,” the mayor of Elne told L’Indépendant.
According to initial information, the deaths were of accidental origin.
“It seems that the young woman felt unwell, and that when she fell, the cigarette she was smoking caused a fire, which fortunately quickly extinguished itself, but which undoubtedly caused her death by asphyxiation, of the little girl, lying in her bed in the next room,” indicates Nicolas Brignol.
Autopsies will be carried out to confirm this hypothesis.
An investigation was entrusted to the Pyrénées-Orientales gendarmerie.