32-yr-old woman sets self, two kids ablaze at home

Kolkata: A north Kolkata woman set herself on fire inside a locked room after immolating her two kids, two-year-old daughter and nine-month old son, on Thursday afternoon.
A resident of Raja Nabakrishna Street in Shovabazar, Shweta Mishra (32), perhaps wanted to save her son after she decided to kill herself. She took the baby to a neighbour’s house an hour before the incident.She asked the neighbour, Bina Debi Gupta, to babysit her son for a few hours. However, Mishra returned as the latter was busy.
Reportedly, Mishra then took her kids in one of the rooms in her home and poured kerosene on herself before and the kids. She then set the trio ablaze. Later, neighbours noticed a thick smoke billowing out of the room’s window. “As we broke open the door, thick flames leapt out. We poured buckets of water to douse it. But it was too late to save them. Al three of them were lying unconscious, said neighbour Ashok Sonkar.
They were rushed to a nearby hospital where Mishra and her son were declared brought dead. Her two year old daughter, Vaishnavi, succumbed to her injuries in the evening.
Apparently, the Mishra family were not very social in their neighbourhood despite living there for decades. The woman mostly preferred to stay indoors and talked to select neighbours. Sometimes she would ask Gupta to watch over her son when she went for shopping nearby.
The neighbours were shocked by the incident as they never heard the Mishra couple arguing. “The woman was his second wife. But they never fought with each other,” Sonkar recounted.