A gust of wind - and one falling tree kills 11 at festival

Eleven spectators at an open-air concert were crushed to death when a huge plane tree was toppled by a tornado-like gust of wind.

Eighty-five others were injured, 17 of them seriously, in the freak accident in Strasbourg on Friday night.

A group called The Yiddish Mamas and Papas was performing in the grounds of the 19th-century Château de Pourtales, near the European Parliament building, about six miles from the centre of Strasbourg. The beauty spot is famous for its ancient trees.

Around 120 people, including families enjoying the first weekend of the school holidays, were watching the show from a bank of seats when a storm began to brew at around 10 o'clock. After the musicians downed their instruments and recommended that people take shelter, high winds of up to 90mph ripped through the area.

"It all happened in a flash," said one survivor, Elisabeth, on French radio. "The rain began to fall and everyone ran to a marquee and huddled in there. Then there were cracking sounds, and someone said, 'I don't think we should hang around here.' So I and my friends went for it. Then the tree fell. We were incredibly lucky."

Some 200 medics, police and firemen dealt with the accident. The victims were trapped beneath the tent, which was pinned down by several tons of wood. Rescue workers with chainsaws took three hours to extricate the last of them. The dead were seven women and four men. Two children were among the seriously injured.

A casualty station was set up in farm buildings, and through the night the injured were shuttled to hospital, while the less seriously hurt were treated in the château. A psychological support team was also on hand. France's President, Jacques Chirac, and Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and the president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, sent messages of condolence.

Storms had been widely forecast for northern France, but the prefect of the Bas-Rhin department, Philippe Morland, defended the authorities' decision not to cancel the concert. "No forecaster can predict the weather with the degree of precision that would have prevented this tragedy," he said. "No one can say that a tornado is going to hit a precise place at a precise time. And it lasted only 10 minutes."

The Pourtales estate was badly hit by storms in December 1999 and reopened to the public only after a major clear-up operation in which unstable trees were felled; one question for the judicial enquiry will be whether foresters failed to detect signs of weakness in the plane tree involved in Friday's accident.

The disaster was by far the worst incident caused by a wave of severe weather that has swept across France over the past two days. On Friday, storms caused two Metro lines to be temporarily closed. In the Morvan region of Burgundy, hailstones the size of ping-pong balls damaged hundreds of roofs, rail traffic was held up in Lorraine after trees fell on to power lines, and several campsites in the south-west had to be evacuated because of swollen rivers.