Three firefighters have been killed in an inferno that raged for nearly 22 hours through a shop and office building and a neighbouring hotel in Urumqi , the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region .
There were no reports of other casualties and the blaze was under control by 6pm yesterday.
The fire broke out on Wednesday night in Dehui International Plaza, a 12-storey building housing more than 2,000 vendors of clothes, cosmetics, toys and other consumer goods. The sellers occupied the first four floors plus the basement, while the remaining floors were used as offices.
'We received a call from that building at 8.25pm,' an official from the Urumqi fire department said.
Mainland media reported that a security guard first noticed the fire in a mop stall on the plaza's first floor and the blaze quickly spread to an adjacent hotel.
Most vendors in the building had finished their day's work and customers had cleared out of the market by 8pm as usual.