MONTREAL — A woman in her 30s is dead after her headscarf and hair became caught in a subway-station escalator.

A bystander found the woman lying at the base of the escalator at Fabre metro station in east-end Montreal around 9:15 a.m.

He alerted transit workers, who called police.

When first responders arrived, the woman was unresponsive.

"We tried to perform resuscitation on site, but we weren't able to save her," paramedic Bob Lamle told QMI Agency.

The exact circumstances of the woman's death weren't immediately clear, but Montreal police spokesman Jean-Pierre Brabant said it appeared "her headscarf and her hair got stuck in the escalator."

"Was she strangled by her scarf or was she the victim of an illness before falling? It's too early to say," Brabant added.

Police shut down the metro station for the investigation.

Investigators were to examine surveillance video as part of their probe.