BEIJING: An investigation into the mysterious death of two young sisters has been launched in eastern China after a family member claimed they died in a washing machine, police said yesterday.
Police in Jiangxi province said they received a call on Sunday enquiring about possible compensation payments for the family of two sisters aged two and three who died after climbing into a washing machine the day before.
The caller said the sisters had already been buried, police in the provincial capital Nanchang said on their verified account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Earlier reports said police had ruled out murder in the case, but the statement made no mention of detectives excluding the possibility of foul play. Previous reports also said the sisters were aged two and four.
The children’s grandfather was quoted in local media reports as describing how the father discovered the girl’s bodies. “The father found the girls curled up in the closed washing machine with a lot of blood when he saw the light on the washing machine was flickering,” he was quoted by a Jiangxi-based online news portal as saying, according to the Global Times newspaper. China’s Haier Group, the machine’s manufacturer, said that the machine would not operate under the conditions that were described.
AFP
