At least 24 people have been killed and 13 injured after a fire swept through a packed Internet cafe in a university district in China's capital Beijing today, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.
One resident said that eight people escaped the fire through a small bathroom window at the disaster site, in an area where Internet cafes, many illegal and with locked doors to keep police out, are popular.
Xinhua said the fire broke out around 2:40 a.m (7:40 p.m. Irish time) in Beijing's university district in the northwest section of the city and was extinguished less than an hour later.
An investigation was underway, it said, without giving more details.
The fire followed a deadly blaze in an Internet cafe earlier this year in China.
Beijing cracks down regularly on cyber cafes, often looking for evidence of people visiting politically sensitive or pornographic Web sites.
By the end of April, there were 200,000 Internet cafes in China and 17,000 had been closed due to illegal activities, Xinhua said last month.
The state-run Henan Legal Dailyreported on Friday that nationwide about 30 per cent of Internet cafes operated without licences and in some places it was 50 per cent.