Wednesday’s fire killed 10 adults with mild intellectual disabilities and a person accompanying them.
The judicial investigation will seek to determine the cause of the fire, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office.
The investigation opens after the discovery that the required security standards were not met in the private rest house located in the Alsatian town of Wintzenheim.
“The first investigations led to questioning the legal and material security conditions of the building,” in which 28 people were, the statement read.
A prosecutor in Paris is taking over the case due to the high number of victims and the scale of the investigation, he said. The case was previously being supervised by the deputy prosecutor of Colmar, in eastern France.
The vacationers were sleeping when the fire broke out early Wednesday morning.
Only five guests who were on the upper floor of the house survived, including three vacationers and two employees who accompanied them. All were released from the hospital on Wednesday, according to the statement.
Another 12 people who were staying on the ground floor managed to escape.
It was the deadliest fire in France since the one registered in August 2016, which killed 14 people in a basement that operated as a nightclub in Rouen, a city in the west of the country.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
