Nine young women in Beijing have died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas water heater, local media said on Friday, the country's worst such accident in recent memory, the Reuters reported.
Police found the girls unconscious on Thursday morning in an apartment in Chaoyang district in the Chinese capital, the Beijing Morning Post said. They were taken to hospital where doctors tried to save them but to no avail.
Another woman survived the accident.
"The preliminary judgement is that the use of an indoor water heater for shower for a relatively long period of time has caused the deaths," the newspaper quoted police as saying.
The 10 women were all migrants from other parts of China working for a local real estate company, it said, adding they just moved into the rented apartment on April 21.