Lucien Abenhaim, the general director for health, told Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei in a letter that he was tendering his resignation "given the present controversies surrounding the handling of the epidemic (of deaths) linked to the heatwave."

Mattei said it was possible the number of deaths from the two weeks of record-breaking temperatures, which ended late last week, had topped the government's previous estimate of 3,000.

"The figure of 5,000 was mentioned yesterday. It's one hypothesis. It's plausible but it's just a hypothesis," he told RTL radio, adding that precise figures would not be known for several weeks.

In his interview, Mattei also acknowledged criticism from doctors and the political opposition that the health crisis had not been adequately handled.

"We didn't have the information and the warning signals that we should have had," he said.

As temperatures soared to around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degree Farenheit) in the first two weeks of August and the bodies of heatwave victims -- most of them elderly -- overfilled morgues and hospitals, the government was increasingly criticised for reacting too slowly and underestimating the scale of the crisis.

Priests and imams in the city's mosques and churches said they were far busier than normal officiating over funerals.

The head of the administrative body that oversees the health system, Gilles Brucker, told Tuesday's issue of Le Monde newspaper there was "obviously... a deficiency" in the way death tolls were reported.

"It isn't acceptable -- and in this we no doubt share some of the responsibility -- that the information in this area (hospital death tolls) was not shared immediately," he said.

"It isn't acceptable that people start to die in big numbers because of the heat without us, collectively, knowing about it so as to tackle the problem."

Abenhaim, who was in charge of Brucker's unit and other parts of France's general directorate of health, had in particular been criticised for failing to notify the government about the wave of deaths.

His acceptance of blame followed attempts by the government to deflect accusations that it failed to sufficiently alert the public and reinforce health services until it was too late.

The left-wing newspaper Liberation mocked in particular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's statement at the weekend that French society -- and not the state health system or the lack of government leadership -- was to blame for the high death toll because it abandoned its elderly people.

The paper said Raffarin was trying to shift blame but that this tactic "was also part of the government's inadequate response to the consequences of the heatwave and its tardiness in recognising there was a public health problem that required a rapid and broad reaction".

Raffarin's centre-right government had cut budgets for the care of the elderly and "the dramas of old age didn't seem to be a priority for him just a few weeks ago," Liberation said.

Abenhaim said on television Monday evening France had been experiencing "the equivalent of an earthquake in the form of a heatwave never yet experienced in the recording of temperatures, which has created a health catastrophe."

But he added: "It's not sure there are any guilty parties involved, or even responsible parties."

"We have experienced... events and effects which were largely unforeseeable," the official said.

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