Rome:
Four children aged between 3 and 11 years died in a fire at an illegal Roma camp on the
outskirts of the Italian capital, officials said.
"The bodies were half burned," a fire service spokesman told yesterday.
The ages of the victims were three, five, seven and eleven, said the spokesman, adding that the remains of what was feared to be a fifth child turned out to be those of a small animal.
The fire started at 8:30 pm (local time) in an illegal encampment along a route that runs southeast out of the city, said Italy's ANSA news agency. The cause is under
investigation.
The family, with seven members in total, lived in one of five makeshift shacks in a camp that authorities had torn down several times, only to see it rebuilt by the Roma.
"These damn illegal camps have to be cleared out of Rome," the city's mayor Gianni Alemanno told reporters as he visited the site.
Campaigners say thousands of Roma live in and around the capital, most of them in illegal constructions, which city authorities last year pledged would be shut down.
They plan to build three new camps to house 6,000 Roma by the end of the year, to add to the seven such camps that already exist around Rome.
Alemanno blamed the "damned bureaucracy" that had blocked this project for Sunday's deaths.