Four Tamil Nadu kids get locked in car, suffocate to death
They had suffocated to death after the car doors got automatically locked
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2014-08-14 02:10 GMT
Thoothukudi: Four children met a most tragic death in a car seized by a bank that was parked among other abandoned cars inside the private compound of a vehicle loan recovery agent in a village in Thoothukudi district.
They had suffocated to death after the car doors got automatically locked in Vedanatham village on Wednesday. “The kids were probably in the locked car for more than five hours since 8 am till they were taken out,” a policeman said.
The DSP, M. Durai, however, cleared the air of suspicions raised by local activists that the children had been locked inside the car by miscreants.
The deceased, all from Thoothukudi, were identified as - Muthazhagu (10) daughter of Anthonysamy, Esakkiyammal (8) daughter of Kanniyappan, Moses (7) son of Sankar, and Aathi (4) son of Pongalraj.
The families had come to the village to attend the Esakkiamman temple festival on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, the four children were seen playing in the yard where several vehicles seized for default in loan repayments had been stationed.
When the kids were pulled out from the car at around 1.30 pm, their muscles were said to have stiffened as a result of suffocation, according to sources at the Thoothukudi medical college hospital, where the bodies of the children were taken for autopsy
The parents, who had been searching for the children since Wednesday morning, were alerted by a small girl in the village, who had, on peeking through the sun film covered windshield of the car, seen the young boy Aathi lying motionless on the steering wheel.
Since the car is reported to have been stationed at the yard along with two more cars and a tractor for about four and a half years, its wheels were buried in the earth and the vehicle would not even have shaken when the panicking children attempted to come out of it. There was no way anyone could have noticed that kids were in distress in these virtually abandoned vehicles in a desolate yard.
The yard owner Muralidaran of Vedanatham, who is a private recovery agent of SBI was picked up by the Kulathoor police for interrogation. The assistant general manager of SBI (vehicle loan section) from Madurai has also been summoned for the inquiry.