LAHORE: Three children died and a young man was burnt after a fire erupted in their house on Walton Road on Friday.

Habeeba, 5, her cousin Faryad, 6, and Nabiha, 2, died due to severe burns.

Dense smoke followed by a fire engulfed the room on the first floor of the four-storey house. The Rescue 1122 ambulances and other vehicles launched an operation while responding to an emergency call of fire in the house.

A spokesperson for the emergency service said the teams found four people trapped in the room. He said the door was locked from inside which hindered the process to evacuate those inside. The officials, he said, broke open the door and found three children dead. Imran was critically injured.

He said those recovered by the rescue teams were the members of two families. He said the cause of the fire could not be ascertained.

Quoting other members of the family, he said the children while playing in the room had locked the door. The family sent for the rescue teams when they saw dense smoke and flames.

The firefighters took an hour or so to control the blaze and the ambulances had earlier shifted the injured to hospital.

Irfan and Yaseen, the heads of the two families, were not at home at the time of the incident.

The spokesperson said the premises had been handed over to police for further investigation.

Suicide: A teenage girl reportedly committed suicide by hanging herself with a ceiling fan of her home in the Green Town area here on Friday.

The parents of the 17-year-old girl (S) alerted the police when they found her body hanging with the ceiling fan.

The police broke open the door and shifted the body to the city morgue. Quoting initial inquiries, a police official said apparently it seemed that the girl ended her life after some issue with her parents.

Further action would be taken on the basis of the postmortem report, he said.

Published in Dawn, May 11th, 2019