Woman Found Dead At Bottom Of Lift Shaft

A woman was found dead on Friday afternoon at the bottom of a lift shaft in a building in Sheung Shui.

Initial reports suggest that the victim is a 64-year-old woman who lived on the 7th floor of Paris Court on Chi Cheong Road.

She's believed to have gotten caught in between the outer doors of the elevator. The lift cabin then went up, and the woman fell down the shaft. Her body was discovered hours later in the afternoon, by repairmen who'd been called in to inspect the broken-down elevator.

Alfred Sit, who heads the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department, said the government was very concerned about this very serious incident. He said it appears that the 'abnormal movement' of the lift cabin had caused the accident, and officials are now looking into why it had apparently malfunctioned.

He said officials are making emergency inspections of all the other lifts in the same estate, and all 90 lifts across the territory that are of the same model will be checked over the next two weeks.

Some residents at the Sheung Shui building told RTHK that they'd previously noticed that lifts at the estate sometimes act strangely - sometimes shaking for no apparent reason, and sometimes even falling so fast that it felt like a rollercoaster.

Urgent inspections were carried out on hundreds of lifts across the territory last month after a couple were seriously injured in an accident in Tsuen Wan. The lift of a residential block suddenly zoomed up from a lower floor and smashed into the top of the building.