Three brothers died and their four siblings were hospitalised on Friday after consuming poisonous mushrooms in the Alpuri tehsil of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Shangla district, according to officials and relatives.

Dr Sajjad Khan, the deputy medical superintendent of Alpuri’s district headquarters hospital confirmed the cause of death of the two brothers to Dawn.com.

Their father, Bakhshi Rehman, also confirmed the same to Dawn.com that his children had consumed a type of mushroom locally called Pech Khreray.

Rehman said his elder son had brought back mushrooms after foraging in the mountains on Thursday and cooked them for dinner which the seven siblings ate. He added that their condition had deteriorated overnight and they all were vomiting.

The father said his four sons and three daughters were moved to the district headquarters hospital where a doctor in the emergency ward had examined them and referred all of them to a hospital in Swat.

Rehman said his two eldest children, aged 16 and 11, died in Swat’s Saidu Teaching Hospital early on Friday morning and he returned to his village with their bodies while his remaining children were hospitalised with relatives attending to them.

The father said the condition of his remaining children was not any better. He later said that another son had died.

Professor Amir Sultan, an expert in Botany at Government Degree College Alpurai, said: “There are 34 types of edible mushrooms found in Shangla and Swat but some of them are poisonous.”

He said there were 14,000 species of mushrooms in the world, among which 2,000 were edible. The professor added that the identification of edible mushrooms was not easy but those which were safe to eat typically had white caps and were eaten from March to August.

Sultan said inedible mushrooms found in Shangla from July to December were the poisonous Fly Agaric, Death cap, Filaris, Destroying Angel and others.

He said the Morchella was one of the popular species of mushrooms found in Shangla which was widely consumed and sold at high prices.

“It is unclear which species they (the siblings) ate but the name they used, I guess it was inedible,” the professor said.

He urged people to avoid eating mushrooms if they had no knowledge of their identification.

Last week, a similar tragedy struck as two minor siblings died after allegedly consuming poisonous mushrooms in Mir Kanai Chawga area of Puran tehsil.