10-Year-Old Boy Rehearsing A Play Dies While Re-Enacting Execution Scene

A 10-year-old Indian boy accidentally hanged himself to death while rehearsing for a play that was to be staged on Independence Day, police said.

On July 29, the child, identified as Shivam was reportedly re-enacting the hanging of the Indian freedom fighter, Bhagat Singh for a play to be staged on August 15, Indian Independence Day.

The child, a resident of Babat village in the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh, was rehearsing the scene of Bhagat Singh’s execution along with other children when the fatal accident occurred, police said Saturday.

During the rehearsal, the boy, who was playing the role of Bhagat Singh, stood on a wooden stool and tied a noose around his neck.

However, the wooden platform accidentally slipped, causing him to hang, locals said.

The children who witnessed the incident panicked and screamed for help.

Residents rushed to the scene after hearing the children scream. They brought him down from the noose, but the boy had died by then.

The villagers then alerted the boy’s parents who were working on the nearby farm.

The family cremated the boy’s body soon after the incident without informing the police, an investigating officer said.

An investigation team led by Station House Officer (SHO) of Kunwargaon Police Station responded to the scene the next day but the boy’s family members refused to provide any information about the child’s death, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Badaun, Sankalp Sharma said.

The SSP said the death is being investigated.

This is an ongoing investigation and no further details were available at the time of this writing.

In a similar but unrelated incident, a 13-year-old boy from the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, India, hanged himself to death on Friday, July 30, reportedly after his mother berated him for wasting money in an online game.

The teen reportedly withdrew Rs 40,000 ($ 540 approx.) from his mother’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) account and misspend it in the online game, 'Free Fire'.

The mother, who was at work, called the boy and upbraided him after she received an alert on her cellphone about the debited money.

"The boy then locked himself inside a room. After some time, his elder sister found that he was not opening the door and informed her parents about it," an investigating officer said.

The door was broken open and the boy was found hanging from the ceiling fan using a scarf, police added.

"My son started playing online games due to online classes. I didn’t know that his time pass will turn fatal," the boy's father said.