FOUR people were killed and 23 others injured in a fire at a block of flats in a city in western Germany.
One of the injured had jumped off the roof of the burning building in Saarbruecken.
More than 100 firefighters and 25 police officers turned out to try to rescue tenants from a building where most residents live on public assistance.
The fire was reported to have started on the first or second floor and quickly spread higher.
Police said the cause of the blaze was not yet known.
Berlin was also hit by a major fire over the weekend, with 18 people injured, three of them seriously, in a blaze in a high-rise building in the Biesdorf district of the capital.
Elsewhere in Germany, heavy snow caused two deaths, several accidents and dozens of cancelled flights.
The German news agency dpa reported that an 86-year-old woman died a car crash in Uelzen in Lower Saxony.
Police also said an 83-year-old man with dementia froze to death in Kolleda in the east of the country. Officers found his body in the snow on the side of a road near the nursing home where he lived. It is believed he may have got lost.
In Frankfurt, more than 80 flights had to be cancelled because of the weather.
Several high-speed InterCity Express trains were ordered to slow down in central and southern Germany due to the snow.
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