VIJAYAWADA: Five children drowned in two separate incidents, reported in Perakalapadu and Chillaboinapalli of Krishna district on Tuesday. In the first incident, three brothers, all minors, fell in a canal in Perakalapadu village of Kanchikacherla Mandal. According to the Kanchikacherla police, the three deceased were identified as Gujjarlanka Ganesh (9), Srimanthudu (7) and Gowtham (5). The incident happened around 1 pm when the brothers reportedly went to the nearby canal for relieving themselves.
Then they accidentally fell into the canal, as none of them knew how to swim, they drowned. “Noticing the three children drowning in the canal, villagers rushed to the spot but were not able to rescue them. By the time they brought the children to the shore, they were dead. “The children lived with their grandmother as their parents, Ramu and Swarnalatha, were in Karnataka to work under a civil contractor,” said a police officer.
The second incident was reported from Chillaboinapalli in Musunur Mandal, where two children, Mareedu Praveen Kumar (12) and Ponnur Prasanna Kumar (9) fell inside a quarry pit and died. “The two children belonged to the same family and had come to the village to attend a family function last Wednesday,” said the Nuzvid police. A case of accidental death was filed and the bodies were sent to a government hospital for postmortem.