In what could be termed as a horrifying incident to say the least, as many as eight migrant workers were found dead in a well near Warangal town in Telangana, police said on Friday, May 23. The cops also retrieved the dead body of a local resident from the open well which is located beside a cold storage unit in Gorrekunta village.
While four bodies were recovered from the well on Thursday, five more corpses were pulled out on Friday. The dead include six members of a migrant family from West Bengal, two workers from Bihar and one local resident who hails from Tripura.
3-year-old among nine dead
As per the Telangana police, the rescue workers found the corpses of four members of the migrant family on late Thursday which included Mohammed Maqsood (56), who was working in a jute bag stitching shop in Warangal, his wife Nisha (48), their daughter Bushra (24) and his three-year-old son.
The dead bodies recovered on Friday were of Maqsood's two sons Sohail and Shabad, Sriram and Shyam from Bihar and Shakeel Ahmed from Tripura. All the bodies were later shifted to Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Warangal for autopsy.
Warangal Police Commissioner V. Ravinder told reporters that special teams were constituted to probe the case. "There are no external injuries on the bodies. The cause of their death will be known after we receive autopsy reports. We are probing the case from all angles," he said.
Mystery shrouds death of the nine persons
ACP Shyam Sundar, who is investigating the case, has ruled out the possibility of mass suicide. "If it was a suicide pact, only the family of six would have committed suicide but there are three other bodies. We are investigating several angles," he said.
Upon further probe, the cops learned that Maqsood was out of work due to the COVID-19 lockdown and was given shelter by the owner of the jute mill, S Bhasker, at a godown.
"Maqsood's family has been living here for 20 years. Shakeel used to work as a driver at the jute mill while Shyam and Sriram worked in the mill. Maqsood's daughter is divorced and she also lived there with her 3-year-old son," police said.
It was on Thursday that the migrant family and the three others went missing which propelled Bhaskar to alert the police. As per Bhaskar, the family as well as the others had enough cash and dry ration and were not under any sort of stress.
