Five people were killed when part of the roof collapsed at a new terminal at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport yesterday, triggering a search for trapped survivors and questions about the showcase building's safety.
Rescue workers said another person was unlikely to survive and three others were badly hurt. Most of the victims were passengers.
Slabs of concrete, metal and glass crashed down onto a waiting area in terminal 2E just before 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) shortly after passengers noticed cracks in the ceiling.
The accident brought down a 50-metre long, 30-metre wide section of the tunnel-like building.
The collapse happened just 11 months after the terminal opened following several construction delays.
"Time is a factor. We have to get to the injured as quickly as possible," fire brigade spokesman Laurent Vibert said as rescue workers with sniffer dogs searched through the rubble.
"It's like a scene after an earthquake," said anotherfirefighter at the airport at Roissy, northeast of the centre of Paris.
Police started evacuating and sealing off the area soon after passengers alerted them to the cracks and dust falling from the futuristic domed roof perforated with small windows. Planes were arriving from Newark in the United States and Johannesburg at the time, and one was leaving for Prague. The injured included one person from China and one from Ivory Coast.
The Interior Ministry and local officials initially said six people were killed, but fire officials later said five had been confirmed dead and a sixth was expected to be.
It was not clear if that person was badly hurt or was missing.
The French government ruled out a terror attack but said the cause of the accident was unknown.
Airport officials said legal and administrative inquiries had been launched. The discovery of any construction or design faults would be a blow to the prestige and coffers of Aeroports de Paris (ADP), the Paris airports authority.
Air France could also be affected if traffic is disrupted. Terminal 2E is mainly used by the French carrier but also by other international airlines in its SkyTeam alliance - AeroMexico, Alitalia, CSA, Delta and Korean Airlines.
"Passengers heard cracks and saw dust coming down and notified police who started to evacuate the area," said Pierre Graff, the head of ADP. "This was a very prestigious hall and it's a very hard day for us today."
The terminal opened last June at a cost of 750 million euros ($900 million). It opened late, partly because a commission at first withheld a safety certificate.
French media quickly asked if construction had been completed properly or had been rushed. Jean-Paul Huchon, president of the greater Paris region, said: "We still don't know the cause but it might have been a construction fault."
Airline safety expert David Learmount of Flight International said there were many questions to answer.
"Whether this was a construction error or... a design weakness, that has to be established right now. Is this a design weakness and they have to stop using it? Or was there actually a construction mistake?" he told Britain's Sky television.
Charles de Gaulle airport handles 58 million passengers each year. Terminal 2E, which has more than 50 flights a day, is intended eventually to have a capacity of 10 million passengers a year.
Air France said flights were being redirected to other terminals which remained open yesterday.