MYSTERY continues to surround the cause of a fire in a York flat which saw a window fly across a street after an explosion in the property.

Laura McIntyre, who lived in the Lawrence Street flat with Ronan Curran and their daughter Laila Kay Curran, said they would have probably been killed if they had been in the flat at the time of the blast.

Fire chiefs put the cause of the blaze down to a microwave.

The appliance had been bought from Asda, but the company today said it had since tested the machine and found no fault with it.

However, it was unable to rule out the microwave as the cause of the fire.

The news comes after Asda announced it was recalling 300,000 microwaves - not the same model - after three customers complained they had been overheating.

A spokesman said the customers did not say the machines - which were all Asda Durabrand microwaves - had caught fire.

Luckily Laura, Ronan and Laila - whose cot was hit by rubble after a wall collapsed following the explosion - were looking after Laura's parents' house in Clifton, York, at the time of the incident, last November.

North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service station officer Alan Bell, who was in charge of the investigation into the incident, said at the time the service believed a microwave in the flat was responsible for the fire.

Mr Bell said: "Although we believe the microwave was responsible for the fire in the first place, we don't think it exploded.

"Instead, we think an aerosol can which was near the microwave and contains a flammable mixture has ignited because of the small fire."

Mr Bell said today the cause of the fire was still under investigation, but the service continued to believe the microwave had caught fire and caused the aerosol canisters to explode.

Asda today confirmed the microwave in the flat - a model called ONN - had been purchased from one of its stores.

It said that after the fire the microwave had been tested to see if there had been any fault with the machine. "That microwave was sent to Asda and tested in the lab and no fault was found with it," a company spokesman said.

"We can't rule out that the microwave caused the fire - because we could only test what remained of it we can't rule out that it was the cause of the fire. We've done everything we can to try to ascertain that it wasn't.

"From the testing that we could carry out, there was no fault."