Battling thick smoke and flames several feet high, Montreal police officers managed to rescue an one-year-old girl, found alone and in tears, from a burning apartment building early Thursday.

Investigators are meeting with the child's babysitter, a 49-year-old woman with a criminal record, including a conviction for drug trafficking. She has another case pending on allegations of theft.

Const. Manuel Couture said the woman could face a charge of criminal negligence in connection with the fire.

The toddler's mother, whom CBC News is not naming to protect the child's identity, told Radio-Canada she was aware of her babysitter's past.

"Many people in my entourage knew her and she often watched her when it was just an hour or two. She never did anything wrong to my daughter. She was always very good with my daughter. I would never have left my daughter with someone who … I'm too much of a mother hen," she said.

Nearby officers run to scene

At around 12:45 a.m., about 20 police officers were working near the intersection of de Rouen and Dézéry streets when neighbourhood residents flagged them down, saying a fire had broken out in a nearby apartment building.

Serge Lévesque, who lives in the unit above where the fire broke out, says he jumped from his balcony to his neighbour's because with smoke filling the stairwell outside his door, he thought he was trapped.

He screamed at the officers from that balcony.

"What I said was, 'There's [a] baby living there,'" he said, referring to the unit below.

Some of the officers rushed over to the building, carrying 15 fire extinguishers. When they got to the unit it was enveloped in smoke, forcing them to crawl to rescue the girl.

Right place, right time

Sgt. Hugues Thibault was one of the officers who helped rescue the girl. He said while they were in the building, he and his colleagues didn't hear a smoke alarm.

"We were lucky, because we were there. We were really there at the right moment. Had we not been there, people could have died."

Thibault said he was proud to see his colleagues act so quickly, a sentiment echoed by police Chief Philippe Pichet, who acknowledged the officers in a tweet.

Congratulations to my <a href="https://twitter.com/SPVM">@SPVM</a> officers! What a great job, i m very proud of you! 👍 <a href="https://t.co/1aQJabEBPy">https://t.co/1aQJabEBPy</a> —@Dir_Pichet

Thibault had been part of a team of officers who for hours were dealing with an unrelated case nearby, in which a man in psychological distress had barricaded himself in his home.

The team managed to calm the man down and turned him over to paramedics. As they were packing up, they heard people yelling about a fire down the street. He and some other officers ran over.

"We all took an extinguisher and went in the front door to try and figure out where the fire started," he said.

Police acted on 'instinct'

They went up to the second floor and heard a child crying. They broke down the door and thick, black smoke came billowing out. They couldn't see much — except the light from the flames coming from the back, Thibault said.

He and some other officers went down to the first floor and passed through an apartment to get to the fire escape in order to access the second-floor apartment from the back door.

They were greeted by flames as high as the ceiling, he said. He and his colleagues took turns using their extinguishers to douse them, then trying to get inside.

Sgt. Hugues Thibault was one of the officers battling flames and thick smoke while trying to rescue the little girl. He says it was lucky they were in the neighbourhood at the time. (Radio-Canada)

As it turned out, his colleagues at the front door were able to find the child, who was having trouble breathing, and carried her out.

She was taken to hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation and is expected to recover.

"We aren't trained to do things like this," Thibault said. "It's really by instinct, a survival instinct that has us react like that."

Something left on stove

It appears the babysitter had put something on the stove, then left that unit to go to another, Couture said. She was still in the building when the fire broke out.

The officers had to break down the doors to several apartments to get other tenants out. In all, about 30 people were forced out of their homes.

Four police officers were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation, while four others were treated at the scene.

Lévesque, the neighbour, said after the shock of the event wore off, he realized the police had put their lives on the line and likely saved the girl's life.

He said the event was a reminder that while there are bad cops, there are good ones too.

Neighbour Serge Lévesque points to the unit where a fire broke out early Thursday morning in Montreal's Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood. (Charles Contant/CBC)

"There are people, too many times, especially now, [these] days ... we call them pigs. No pigs behave like that. They are men."