Hyderabad building fire: Woman found holding four children in final embrace

HYDERABAD: The sight of the burnt body of an aged woman tightly hugging four children – all of them dead – is likely to haunt first responders, Mir Zahid and Mohd Azmat, for a long time.

"When we finally managed to get inside the building and reached the first floor, we saw that the lady was sitting on the floor and hugging the children around her. Among them were two young girls, a boy and an infant. She must have tried to protect them from the flames. The woman was holding on to a phone with its inbuilt torch lit. Unfortunately, none of them survived," Zahid, a local who tried to rescue the residents inside the Modi household, told TOI.

Their bodies were carried out in the same position.

"We then put a bedsheet on them as it was an unbearable scene. All of them had burn injuries. I don't think I will ever be able to put into words what I saw in the house," said Azmat.

The men found two more bodies in the same room.

Zahid and his friends managed to enter the building by breaking the wall of an adjacent structure. But by the time they entered the house, most of the victims had died. They managed to pull out bodies of seven of the victims.