Girl dies in house fire

The fire started in an upstairs bedroom

A six-year-old girl has been killed and two other children critically injured in a house fire in Wolverhampton.

The three children were asleep in the house in the Bushbury area when the fire broke out in an upstairs bedroom shortly after 0400 BST on Tuesday.

Firefighters arrived quickly after a 15-year-old boy escaped from the house and raised the alarm.

A West Midlands Fire Brigade spokesman said that the dead girl would have been saved if the house had been fitted correctly with a working smoke alarm.

Not breathing

She was later named as Chante Miller, who was staying with relatives at the house.

The two other children, who live at the address, were taken to New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton suffering from smoke inhalation and exposure to intense heat.

They have now been transferred to Birmingham Children's Hospital.

An adult man was also rescued and is now in hospital, but his injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.

Both he and the two injured children had stopped breathing, and were resuscitated by firefighters at the scene.

A woman, the mother of the two injured children, escaped by jumping out of a window - she was caught by neighbours who had gathered outside with the 15-year-old boy.

Electrical fault

A spokesman for West Midlands Fire Service said that although there had been a smoke alarm at the house, it had no batteries and was wrongly positioned on the ground floor.

He said: "There's no doubt about it - that family would not be injured, and there would have been no fatality, if there had been a working smoke alarm.

"They were rescued within one minute of our arrival, and if we had been called earlier they would all be alive."

The fire is not being treated as suspicious.

Fire teams are currently investigating the cause, but it is thought that an electrical fault is the most probable explanation.