A Montreal condominium complex has burned to the ground before anybody had a chance to live in its units.

The six-building complex burned down Friday morning in a five-alarm blaze that fire officials have deemed suspicious.

Dozens of units were destroyed at the Faubourg Contrecoeur condominium project site in the city's east-end on Friday morning.

The fire broke out around 6 a.m. and within two hours fire crews had the fire under control. Soon after, the blaze was under investigation by police.

"The arson squad is on the case," Montreal police spokesman Olivier Lapointe said Friday.

"Not because something was found that shows clearly it was criminal but because the firefighters weren't able to find anything to show it was accidental. Right now, we can say it's a suspicious fire and it's our work to find the cause."

Montreal Fire Department operations chief Jean Leblanc said the fact that the buildings weren't fully completed contributed to their demise.

"They were buildings under construction so there was a lot of wood and nothing to stop the fire from spreading from one building to the other," Leblanc said.

Two people at the scene of the fire told CTV Montreal that tenants were supposed to move into the buildings earlier this month. But they said there had been delays.

Andr� Fortin, the president of the company that is developing the property, released a statement Friday, indicating that Groupe Immobilier Catania would continue work on the site as soon as possible.

According to the government Soci�t� d'habitation et de d�veloppement de Montreal website, the condominiums were part of a large-scale development project that will see

some 1,800 housing units on 38 hectares of east-end property.

This isn't the first time the property has been surrounded by controversy.

The land was originally owned by the city through the Societe d'habitation et de developpement de Montreal (SHDM).

After the city privatized the SHDM, the land was sold to local developer Frank Catania, but there were irregularities in the way the file was handled.

In fact, an accounting audit found that the land was sold for less than it was worth, and the SHDM's then-director general, Martial Fillion, was later dismissed.

With files from CTV Montreal and The Canadian Press