Three Hong Kong people, including two men and one woman, died in a fire in an industrial building in Kwai Chung in the New Territories on Saturday evening.
The blaze started at 6pm in a subdivided unit on the 10th floor of Mai Sik Industrial Building on Kwai Ting Road, Apple Daily reported.
Firemen arrived and put the fire out in half an hour.
The two men, surnamed Luk, 25 and Siu, 18, together with Luk’s 21-year-old girlfriend surnamed Cheng, were found unconscious in a washroom. They were sent to hospital but all were listed as dead on arrival.
Police are investigating the cause of the fire – to see if it may have been caused by a magic trick gone wrong, as the couple used to practice magic using phosphorus powder, an inflammable chemical, in the unit they rented.
On Sunday, a number of Filipino domestic workers wanted to go to a church on the eighth floor of the industrial building for worship but were blocked by security guards, Oriental Daily reported.
One of the workers named Shella told media that she went to the floor where the fire broke out and found water on the ground and a bad smell of burning.
After investigating, officers found that the 47-year-old industrial building had no automatic sprinkler system and that the unit on the 10th floor had been subdivided into 17 rooms.