SWAT: Four people, including three siblings, suffocated and two others fell unconscious in separate incidents of gas leak here on Saturday.

According to the Charbagh police, a widow along with her three children was sleeping in a room of her house with a gas heater on, and the leaking gas suffocated the three children and the woman to fall unconscious.

“It seems the heater might have stopped burning when there was a gas outage and when the supply got restored gas filled the room, suffocating the minors,” a police official said, adding the family inhaled toxic fumes during their sleep causing death of three children.

The official said the woman was rushed to Saidu Teaching Hospital, where she was reportedly out of danger.

The police identified the deceased children as six-year-old Hazrat Shah, four-year-old Wajiha and two-year-old Manahil.

In another incident, a woman from Karachi suffocated due to gas leakage in Madyan valley.

The Madyan police officials said that a tourist from Karachi, Sabir Hussain and his wife were staying in a hotel room.

“They left a gas heater on when they went to sleep. The room got filled with gas, suffocating them,” a police official said, adding that the hotel management broke open the door to the room after the couple did not respond to the knocks in the morning, and found the woman dead and her husband unconscious.

He was rushed to a hospital, where he was under treatment.

Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2022