Children rescued from the blazing Leopards? Plaza housing block in the early hours of Saturday morning returned there the same evening ? to sleep in rooms reeking and blackened by smoke.

The parents of two small girls ? the youngest of whom had to be tied to bed sheets and lowered from an upstairs bedroom as the fire raged ? said they had no choice but to take their children back to the bleak one-room unit they call home.

That room, which has just one double bed for the whole family, is inches away from where the fire began in another unit just after 1 a.m. on Saturday.

The stench of smoke was still powerful last night and the hallway and stairs leading to the room was in darkness, due to the electricity being shut off for safety reasons. Bermuda Fire Service has said that wires exposed and melted by the blaze made the building unfit to live in. The 33-year-old mother of the girls, who would not give her name, sobbed yesterday as she told how her youngest daughter had nightmares the evening of the fire.

?I had no other choice but to bring them back into the burnt building to sleep,? she said. ?But the six-year-old, all she does is cry, cry, cry, because all she dreams is being dropped out of the window. At 9.30 a.m. this morning she awoke screaming.?

The woman, whose children have now gone to stay with a family friend, said she and her partner had nowhere to go and did not know where to turn for help. She is recovering from major surgery and could not work, while her partner, 44, did not earn enough as a mason to pay for decent accommodation.

The woman claimed that $1,500 in cash was stolen from her room when it was ransacked after the fire. ?My plan was to stay here until I had saved up enough money but the money that I had was stolen.?

She added: ?Where can we go? We worried about our safety last night but we had no other choice because we don?t have anywhere to go.?

She and other tenants at Leopards? Plaza said no one from Government had been to visit the property since the fire.

The mother said: ?Bermuda needs to come together and try to help us whether we owe BHC (Bermuda Housing Corporation) money or not.?

Another mother, who has lived in the dilapidated block with her three children for two years, told on Saturday evening how she planned to stay there by candlelight but had sent her children away with relatives.

?I?m upset,? she said. ?I have nowhere to go. A hotel is the only option but who is going to pay for it??

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Housing said last night that Housing Minister David Burch was ?keenly aware of the plight of the residents of the Leopards? Club?. She said the Ministry was looking into the situation.