In a gruesome incident, a one-year-old baby boy Vallabh Venu was bitten and mauled to death by stray dogs at New Hanuman Nagar, Nagaram on the city outskirts on Sunday night. The child’s body was found in a badly mangled state by passers-by on Monday morning who immediately raised an alarm to wake up the parents and others in the locality.
The shocked parents, Mahesh (24) and Shobha (20), rushed the boy to Gandhi Hospital on Monday where he was declared brought dead. According to sources, the child’s body had dog bites at several places, wounds and lacerations from the dog bites on hands and head and neck region.
According to locals, the blood-stained body was on the ground, just a few metres away from the makeshift hut of the child’s family. The child’s parents, along with their three-year-old son, were fast asleep when the stray dogs apparently sneaked into the hut and attacked the sleeping infant on Sunday night. The poverty-stricken family did not have any means to afford a wooden door for the hut, which could have given them some semblance of security from intruders. The hut simply had a curtain made up of jute bags, which possibly made it easy for the dogs to enter.
The police, who have registered a case of suspicious death under IPC Section 174, maintained that the child’s body was mangled and had marks of dog bites everywhere. “We would be able to comment on the issue only after our investigations are done,” the police maintained.