Seventeen people were killed Wednesday in a fire at a clothing store in the southern Philippines, police said. The victims, mostly women, were workers sleeping at the store in Butuan City, 825 kilometres south of Manila, said Chief Superintendent Reynaldo Rafal, a regional police commander. Three workers survived the fire after jumping from the building's second floor while one was missing and feared dead, Rafal was quoted as saying by DPA. The cause of the pre-dawn fire was undetermined, but survivors said they heard an explosion before it broke out. City Vice Mayor Lawrence Fortun said some of the workers failed to flee from the fire because the steel doors of the store were locked from the outside.
