City Reporter
At least five children were drowned while swimming in a pothole, filled with water in Karachi’s Surjani Town, Sector 7D.
According to rescue sources, a group of five children was swimming in water collected in a plot of an under-construction building.
The bodies were later recovered and shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital. The children were between the ages of nine and 14, according to rescue officials.
They were identified as Zubair, Aman, Abdullah, and brothers, Aseed and Maqsood.Area residents have accused the builders and officials of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board of negligence.
They claimed that it was water from a faulty pipeline that had accumulated in the three to four feet deep pit.Last year in the month of November, three cousins drowned while bathing in the sea at Manora beach.
Police and rescuers said the deceased had gone for a picnic in Manora near PNS Himalaya.Responding to the information, divers reached the scene and started a search and rescue operation.
It took two hours for them to retrieve the bodies of all the three men.The bodies were shifted to Civil Hospital, Karachi for medico-legal formalities. The deceased were identified as Mehran, Malhar Khan and Fahad.According to SHO Ghaffar Shah, the three men were residents of Gulistan-e-Jauhar and hailed from Moro.
Meanwhile, The children had reportedly jumped into the pit while playing.
Area residents called rescue teams immediately, but by the time they arrived, all five children had drowned.
The bodies were retrieved from the water by the rescue workers in an operation that took half an hour and were then shifted to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for medico-legal formalities.
The deceased children were identified as Masood, 13, his brother Usaid, 8, Arman, 13, Furqan, 11, and Zubair, 12. Opting to forego legal formalities, the families took the bodies to the morgue for the last rites.
Masood’s father, Ahmed Attari, told The Express Tribune that Masood was the eldest of his four children and was studying in a madrassa, while Usaid had just started going to school.
According to Attari, his sons used to ask for permission to bathe in the water-filled pit, but he had forbidden them from doing so due to its depth.
“Both the children got a chance to fulfill their desire when they found us sleeping after Sehri and went out to play in the pit,” said Attari.
Zubair’s elder brother, Muhammad Umair, shared a similar story, narrating that his younger brother had asked for permission to play in the pit with his friends on Sunday morning.
Despite being told not to do so, he went there anyway.
