Hong Kong man makes death-defying leap from eighth-floor flat to an adjacent rooftop after fire breaks out in his building

A 35-year-old Hong Kong man cheated death on Wednesday night by jumping across a three-metre (9.8-foot) gap from the laundry rack outside his eighth-floor flat onto the roof of an adjacent building after a fire broke out in his housing block in a suspected case of arson.

An online video shows the man standing on the rack as dense smoke pours from his flat before taking the hair-raising leap onto the roof of the neighbouring residential block on Wa Fung Street, in Hung Hom.