05 Dec 2012
A 91-year-old woman died in a blaze at a flat in Manchester in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Irene Landau was found in her bedroom, where the fire is believed to have started, and died at the scene, Manchester Fire Service said.
Firefighters raced to the fourth-floor flat at Ashfield Lodge, Palatine Road, Didsbury, shortly after midnight.
Irene’s 47-year-old carer escaped from the flat after sustaining burns trying to save the nonagenarian and informed fire crews that the 91-year-old remained inside the building, the BBC reported.
Although an investigation has begun into how the fire started, the death is not being treated as suspicious and the fire is thought to have started from one of the pensioner’s discarded cigarettes.
“One woman had managed to rescue herself and had suffered burns while trying to rescue the elderly lady,” watch manager Steve Jordan, from Withington Fire Station, said.
“The fire had started in the bedroom and it wasn’t a particularly large fire but it appeared to have been smouldering away and unfortunately, due to there being no working smoke alarms in the property, the fire had gone unnoticed for some time.”
Copyright Press Association 2012