Six boys drown: while swimming in canal at Jamshoro

All victims belonged to the Hindu community and lived in the Sochi Para area.

HYDERABAD:

Six youngsters from the Hindu community, who went missing on Friday, had drowned while swimming in a water canal which springs from River Indus in Jamshoro.

The bodies of four of the boys were found by Saturday evening from Kotri tehsil's Khanpur village, some three to four kilometres downstream from the point where the Kalri Baglihar Feeder starts.

The deceased boys have been identified as 12-year-old Kishore Kumar, 13-year-old Akash Kumar, 14-year-old Vishal, 15-year-old Santosh Kumar, 15-year-old Sooraj Kumar and 16-year-old Prakash. All of them belonged to the Sochi Para area near Khai Road in downtown City taluka of Hyderabad. Five of them were enrolled at Akhtar Memorial School in Paretabad while Prakash was enrolled at Noor Muhammad High School.

On Friday, the boys had come to their parents' shoe shops. "They left for Al-Manzar [a restaurant and tourist spot at Kotri Barrage] on Friday afternoon but they didn't return till evening," said Prakash's grief-stricken father, Ram Chand. The families looked for them at Al-Manzar, the Rani Baagh zoo and at the homes of their relatives and friends but were unable to fine them. Chand said they later went to several police stations to file complaints about the missing boys.

Chand said they earlier thought that the boys had been kidnapped. On Saturday, the worried families staged a three-hour-long sit-in outside Hyderabad Press Club, only ending the protest when they came to know the boys had drowned.

A relative, Bhagwandas, told The Express Tribune they first came to know about the deaths through a Twitter message from someone named 'Inqalab Jo Awaz'. All the families at the protest rushed to the spot along the canal and later to the hospital to identify the victims. By Saturday evening, four of the bodies were recovered from the canal.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 25^th, 2014.