A hotel cleaner in Japan was crushed to death in front of her colleague when she stepped into a moving elevator, police say.

The 63-year-old woman was trapped between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the building.

“The doors opened and she went to get in, but the cage was still moving up,” said a police official in Kanazawa, central Japan. “She stumbled over the rising lift floor and fell.”

“The cage kept ascending, trapping her between the ceiling (of the building) and the elevator floor,” the official said, adding a colleague standing behind her witnessed the accident which occurred Wednesday afternoon.

The lift’s manufacturer, Switzerland-based Schindler, said in a statement it was cooperating with a police probe into the incident, adding the elevator in question was installed in 1998.

Since 2009, Japanese law has required lifts to be equipped with a brake that prevents them moving when the doors are open.

One of Schindler’s lifts was involved in a fatal incident in 2006 when a 16-year-old schoolboy in Japan was crushed to death.