A four-year-old boy died after he was washed away by gushing waters when he accidentally stepped into an uncovered nullah (drain) at Pragati Nagar under Bachupally police limits on Tuesday, after intensive four hour search the body was finally retrieved from Thurka Cheruvu into which the drain flows.
The police said Mithun, son of Santosh Reddy, a private employee, and Shyamala, a homemaker, from NRI Colony, was outside their home at around 11.30 a.m., a little after the heavy rain subsided.
A corresponding footage, retrieved from a nearby CCTV, showed the boy walking on the edge of the colony road behind an elderly man. While the man took a longer step to cross the uncovered portion of the flooded nullah, the boy attempting to cross it fell in, and instantly disappeared.
It was suspected that locals removed the concrete cover of the nullah to let the flood water drain from the colony road.
Officials from the Disaster Response Force, along with the police and the Revenue, launched an operation to trace the boy. As per suspicion of the locals, since the nullah drains towards the Thurka Cheruvu in Nizampet limits, about a kilometre from the incident site, search teams were engaged in the operation there and the body was retrieved from the lake in the evening.
The Bachupally police have opened a probe.
