Are Immigrants Being Attacked In France? 1 Dead, 14 Injured In Deliberate Migrant Shelter Fire

After a fire at a migrant worker shelter killed one resident and injured 14 others in a suburb just west of Paris Thursday night and early Friday morning, authorities discovered fuel and other fire accelerants at the site, Agence France-Presse reported. Investigators told AFP they assumed the blaze — which left three people severely wounded and five hospitalized — was “of criminal origin.”

The single victim, a 40-year-old man from Mali who had been living at the shelter for about four years, had jumped from a fourth-floor window to avoid the toxic smoke that spread across the floor, investigators told AFP. Two others escaped the fumes through windows of the six-story, 78-room shelter in Boulogne-Billancourt.

The fire, which only burned the lobby of the building and a nearby storage room, did not reach any of the migrants’ lodgings, and authorities sought to allow them to return to their rooms as soon as the scene had been fully investigated, according to AFP.

A similar fire at a new, unoccupied center set to house up to 200 migrants occurred in September in Forges-les-Bains, just south of Boulogne-Billancourt, the newspaper Le Parisien reported. The suspected arson erupted just hours after about 150 locals met with the mayor of Forges-les-Bains to debate the suburb’s acceptance of refugees.

As in most of Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise in France over the past few years. It increased especially after the Nov. 13, 2015 attacks in the capital, as evidenced in part by the surge in popularity of the far-right, nativist Front National party led by Marine Le Pen.

The Front National head and daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is neck-and-neck with Republican Francois Fillon for the April 2017 presidential election. Recent polls indicate that she’s anywhere between tied with him or trailing him by 5 percentage points.