13 die in Paris hotel fire
(CNN) -- French firefighters are battling a hotel blaze in central Paris they say has killed 13 people, many of them children, and seriously injured 15 others.
The blaze at the Paris-Opera hotel in the city's ninth district on Friday morning was so bad that guests leapt from upper floor windows to escape the flames and choking smoke, officials said.
Another 50 people were wounded after the blaze broke out on the sixth floor of the hotel at about 2.30 a.m., and are being taken to a hospital in Paris, fire brigade spokesman Laurent Vibert told CNN.
The blaze gutted the six-storey hotel, and children and tourists were believed to be among the dead and injured, Vibert earlier told Reuters news agency.
Authorities fear people are still trapped inside on the upper floors and they say they expect the toll to rise.
A man who lives in an adjacent building told The Associated Press he was awakened by cries of "Fire! Fire!"
Chakib San said he saw three people jump from the building, including a woman and a child who lay motionless after hitting the ground.
"They were on the ground. They weren't moving," he said.
"Everyone was screaming," he added. "There were bodies in the road."
The hotel is in a central area of the French capital close to the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps shops which many tourists visit.
San told AP he spoke to Australians, Canadians and Tunisians who escaped the fire. A woman who works in a nearby hotel brought out a ladder and together they used it to rescue a girl from the first floor, said San.
"We got out a little girl. The fire services arrived just afterward," he said.
Seventy-six people were thought to have been in the hotel when the fire, whose cause was still unclear, broke out in the middle of the night, Reuters reported.
The ornate 99-year-old Galeries Lafayette store, popular with tourists and close to the 19th-century Garnier opera house, was used as a makeshift hospital to treat some of the casualties, according to Reuters.
