BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - A girl with flu-like symptoms has died in a Chinese village where a bird flu outbreak had been reported, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Thursday, but Beijing said it had received no reports of human cases.

Three people on a French island off Africa were being tested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first suspected human cases outside Asia of bird flu, which experts fear could mutate to spread easily from human to human and become a pandemic.

Indonesia was investigating possible new bird flu cases on the holiday island of Bali after the death of several domestic fowl, an agriculture ministry official said.

He Yin, 12, and her 10-year-old brother fell ill about a week ago after eating a chicken that had died from an unspecified illness in the Chinese village of Wantang, southern Hunan province, the South China Morning Post reported.

So far there was no evidence linking the Chinese girl's death to the outbreak of bird flu and none of the adults in her family had shown any flu symptoms, the newspaper said. Doctors told her family she had died from fever.

China's Xinhua new agency said the health ministry had received no reports of human cases of the disease and a ministry spokesman said he doubted the girl's death was due to bird flu.

"We haven't received any relevant report on that and I have no information if health authorities there have done autopsy on the girl either," he told Reuters.

"To be honest, we don't even know how the chicken died."

China reported the Hunan outbreak this week following cases in Inner Mongolia in the north and Anhui province in the east. It said the outbreaks had been brought under control.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said his government was taking effective measures to prevent the spread of the deadly H5N1 strain, including massive culling of birds, quarantines and vaccinations of residents in areas where there were outbreaks.

The World Health Organisation's China representative said it had contacted the health ministry for more information on the Hunan girl.     Continued ...