Paris ? Terrified people jumped to their deaths from windows early Friday as fire gutted a six-story budget hotel in the French capital’s premier shopping district. The blaze killed at least 20 people, half of them children, and injured 59, according to police and fire officials and witnesses.

Many of the victims were African immigrants being temporarily housed by the city government in the Paris-Opera hotel, near the Gallerie Lafayette department store in the Opera district. The store, popular with Parisian shoppers and foreign tourists, was turned into a makeshift hospital for the injured.

“We were woken up by people screaming, ‘Fire!’ and I opened my window and saw flames,” said Isabelle Arago, 43, who lives in a building next door. She said she “smelled smoke when the fire started, and it filled the air, and you could feel the heat. But it was raining, which was a blessing.”

“The most shocking thing was to see children being thrown by their parents out windows and there was no one there to catch them,” Arago said. “They just fell to the ground. It’s something horrible and something I’ve never seen in the 23 years I’ve lived in Paris.”

The dead and injured included people from Algeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Portugal, Canada and Ukraine. Three Americans were registered at the hotel, but they were not listed among the dead or injured, according to police.

President Jacques Chirac, who visited the scene early Friday, called the fire “one of the most distressing disasters to have struck Paris.”

The hotel, on a narrow side street, is owned by the city government. Though standing just a few steps from fashionable addresses, it was used to house indigent immigrants, political asylum seekers and people evicted from homes elsewhere in the city. The hotel also was a stop for low-budget tourists.

In this photo released by the Paris Firefighters, members of a firefighting squad lower a guest to safety from the Paris-Opera Hotel. At least 20 people died and 59 were injured early Friday in Paris after a predawn fire swept through the hotel used to house needy African families.

The city had a budget of about $12.4 million for such housing in 2004, the newspaper Le Monde reported. In June it was putting up 4,734 people in various facilities across Paris, the publication said.

The fire apparently started about 2 a.m. in a first-floor breakfast room, fire officials said. About 75 guests and long-term residents were in the hotel at the time. The flames quickly collapsed part of the hotel’s single stairwell, making escape difficult.