She was speaking as police officers went to Man Yuen Building to investigate the fire that broke out in a subdivided flat on the 13th floor shortly before 11pm.
The wife of the deceased said she and her elderly husband had lived at their unit for more than 10 years.
She had just returned to the building when she was told that a fire had broken out.
“My neighbours next door told me: ‘Hey, your unit was on fire’,” she said.
“I immediately put down everything I was carrying and rushed upstairs.”
Once there, she tried pulling her mobility impaired husband – who was lying on the floor – out of the unit but to no avail, despite trying for about 10 minutes.
“The head of the bed was on fire. It must’ve set the pillows on fire. It should be because of [an electrical leakage]. I had not been cooking anything.”
She also suffered burns to her hands.
Yuen, a man who lives a few floors above the couple, said he saw heavy smoke outside the corridor at the time of the incident.
He said the firefighters initially asked him and his family to stay inside their flat but soon told them to evacuate.
Kowloon West district councillor Vincent Cheng told reporters the space in the flat was very narrow.
“There are actually a lot of tenement buildings and subdivided units in Yau Tsim Mong and Sham Shui Po,” he said.
“This kind of a fire poses certain risks. We understand that the deceased was mobility impaired. Was it the narrow space that made it difficult for him to escape?
“I think we have to look into this in future, and I hope the situation with subdivided flats can see improvements as soon as possible.”
Cheng said that, based on what he was given to understand, the scaffolding mesh covering the building, which is undergoing renovations, is fire-retardant.
