A angler who thought he had snagged a winner when he hooked a heavy object during a fishing competition was horrified to find a woman's corpse at the end of the line.

The New Straits Times reported yesterday that he made the grisly discovery when he hooked the body in a weed-filled area of a city lake where a Malay-language newspaper was holding its annual fishing competition.

District police spokesman Mohamad Yusuf Shuib said the corpse, believed to be an ethnic Malay woman in her 20s, had been in the lake for about three days.

"There were no documents on her, and no apparent injuries," Yusuf told the daily.