3 of Erode family with severe burns hospitalised

ERODE: In a bizarre incident noticed in an autorickshaw driver’s house in K K Nagar in Erode early on Monday, three persons were found engulfed in flames and all three were rushed to the government hospital here after neighbours managed to douse the flames.

The horrific spectacle was unimaginable for neighbours of the auto-rickshaw driver Murugesan’s (45) family.

Amid loud cries by the victims, the neighbours found the driver along with his wife Revathi (36) and his mother Parameshwari, all up in flames in what was suspected to be due to self-immolation by all three members of the family. Murugesan also has two girl children.

While all the three were admitted to the burns ward of the ICU and doctors are doing their best to save the family members, the condition of Ravathi is said to be very critical.

Preliminary investigations by the police focused on the angles whether all three committed suicide by self-immolation simultaneously or whether anybody had set fire to them.

Police said that apparently Murugesan had first poured kerosene on his wife and set her on fire.

The husband and wife had been having domestic differences of late, police said and he could have done it in anger.

Seeing her daughter-in-law in flames, her mother-in-law went to Revathi’s rescue and in the process the fire spread to the elderly woman, police said. Shocked at his mother caught in the spreading fire, Murugesan went to Parameshwari’s rescue and this resulted in the driver also being drawn in by the rapidly spreading flames.

It is a triple tragedy which the police are yet to fully piece together, but it has nevertheless sent shockwaves across Erode as it involved three persons in a bizarre act.