An eight-year-old boy died when the parked car in which he was playing burst into a ball of flame on Friday at Meerpet. The elder brother of the boy, who was also playing inside their father’s old Maruti Zen, escaped with burns.
Police are yet to ascertain what triggered the fire inside the diesel car, but ruled out foul play. Sreyan Reddy and his brother Sujan Reddy, 16, an Inter first-year student, stepped into the car parked outside their house in Gayatrinagar around 9.30 a.m.
“We wanted to take out the memory card from the car’s music system,” Sujan was quoted as saying by the police. The boy told the police that suddenly there was a huge sound and when he turned back, flames erupted around him. He rushed inside the house with burn marks on his face. By the time he returned with his mother, the car door got locked. They broke open the windscreen and opened the door. “Sreyan’s clothes had caught fire by then. They rushed him to a private hospital where he died after a few hours,” the Meerpet Inspector J. Venkat Reddy said.
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