The body of the victim found in the night from Saturday to Sunday would be that of a 45-year-old psychiatrist from Calais. The search is now complete.
Rescue operations ended early Sunday morning after the discovery in the night from Saturday to Sunday of a body in the middle of the rubble of the two buildings which collapsed Saturday morning in the center of Lille, probably that of a doctor searched for several hours.
The firefighters indeed found this night the body of a victim, who died in the collapse of two buildings rue Pierre Mauroy, in Lille. According to the commander of the relief operations, Stéphane Beauventre, “there is a lot of convergence so that we are on the person we have been looking for since noon“, a 45-year-old doctor, who had been given an apartment in the building for the weekend. “His body went to the forensic institute. It will be clearly identified later“, he specified.
The victim was located shortly before 1:30 a.m., a police source said. The prefecture confirmed the discovery of a deceased person. According to the first elements, he is a 45-year-old psychiatrist, who had left Calais to go to Reims and had been lent an apartment by friends to spend the night in Lille, told the AFP the prosecutor of the Republic of Lille, Carole Étienne. The Calais hospital center, where this doctor, Dr. Alexandre Klein, officiated, published a press release on Sunday morning to express his “accidental death“. “A tribute will be organized“In memory of the one who was head of the mental health and addictology pole, it is specified.
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Two three-storey buildings, one of which was under construction, had collapsed on Saturday around 9:15 a.m. on rue Pierre-Mauroy, a shopping street in the city center, but most of the inhabitants had been able to be evacuated thanks to the alert launched by one of them a few hours earlier.
Several politicians had initially indicated that there was “noa priori“No victims, before the firefighters announced that they were looking for this doctor whose car was parked on site and who had not shown up for his appointments.
Another person, slightly injured, could be evacuated above the rubble on Saturday afternoon, according to the emergency services.
According to BFMTV, a third building is now threatening to collapse, the one located to the right of the two already collapsed. Findings have established that the walls of this third building had moved more than a meter. A security perimeter has been established and the building has been evacuated: if it does not collapse on its own, the authorities will have it destroyed.
“Lifting of the device»
“We have just passed the dogs again for a final removal of doubt. We will proceed to the lifting of the entire device“, said in the night the lieutenant-colonel Stéphane Beauventre. “The scene now is frozen for the prosecutor.»
The Lille public prosecutor’s office told AFP that it had opened an investigation for “endangering the lives of others” and ordered “forensic expertise“.
According to the Minister Delegate for Housing, Olivier Klein, who will travel to Lille on Monday, this building was not “stricken with insalubrity“.
A dozen people had been evacuated a few hours before the collapse, explained the socialist mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, present on the spot Saturday morning. It was one of the residents, who had returned home at 3 a.m., who gave the alert, after noticing “that the building had moved“. “We couldn’t open the door, we heard rubble falling“, told France Bleu Nord this young man, Thibault Lemay, who immediately warned the emergency services. The municipal police and firefighters decided to evacuate one building, the other seeming empty, estimating “that there was a real riskindicated Martine Aubry.
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