Turkey heaped pressure on German authorities yesterday to speed up an investigation into a fire that killed nine people, amid suspicions that it may have been started by neo-Nazis.

It was an uncomfortable suspicion that the people of Ludwigshafen did not want to deal with as they mourned the deaths on Sunday of the Turks, including five children and a pregnant woman, in what is being called the city’s worst blaze since the Second World War.

Most preferred to marvel at the survival of eight-month-old Onur, dropped by his parents into the arms of a policeman who was thrown to the ground by the impact. “We understand that the officer is seen as a hero but he doesn’t want to be identified,” Dieter Klein, a police spokesman, said. “He was just doing his duty.”

Onur’s parents were being treated in hospital for burns and respiratory problems. The nagging question of who or what started the blaze would not go away yesterday.

“We don’t want another Solingen,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, said. He was referring to a strikingly similar incident in 1993: an arson attack on a Turkish family in the steel town that killed five and ruptured relations between Germans and the Turkish community. Only after sluggish detective work did police arrest four neo-Nazis.

Ludwigshafen, too, has its neo-Nazi hangouts. An industrial city in southwest Germany, it has always employed large numbers of Turks in its chemical factories. As youth unemployment has grown, so has resentment. “We hope that this was not an act based on hostility towards foreigners,” Mr Erdogan said. “We want light shone on this incident as soon as possible.”

Four detectives are to be sent from Turkey and Mr Erdogan will visit victims tomorrow. About 20 people were said still to be in hospital, three on the critical list.

Cranes were used yesterday to lift the remains of the roof, to ensure that the whole structure would not collapse. The fire appears to have swept up a wooden staircase, cutting off the people on the third and fourth floors.

A Turkish website named seven of the nine dead as Medine Kaplan, 50, her daughters-in-law Hülya Kaplan and Döne Kaplan and their children, Kenan, Karanfil, Ilyas and Dilara. According to the Turkish newspaper Sabah, Belma Özkapli died when she jumped out of the window. Police confirmed that one woman died when she missed the rescue blanket after leaping through the smoke and flames.

So far the only suggestion that the fire was started deliberately has come from a seven-year-old child named Aylin. Speaking on television she said: “There was a man who lit his cigarette lighter, lit a stick and then put it under a pram in the hallway.”

As for Onur, he is being cared for by his uncle. It will be some years, say friends, before he will find out the truth about his family — that on one evening he lost his two-year-old brother Ilyas, his aunt and two cousins. And that he is lucky to be alive.

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