Trapped boy dies under pile of clothing

Relief materials sent to help the victims in India instead took the life of one tsunami survivor.

A 10-year-old boy who was playing on a mound of old clothes got trapped beneath it and died of asphyxiation.

Ibrahim Malik's son went missing 12 days after the tsunami struck. The street hawker from the coastal town of Nagore in Nagappattinam, Tamil Nadu state, filed a complaint with police, who initially treated it as a case of child abduction. Child trafficking has been reported in the tsunami-hit areas of Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Copies of the boy's picture were circulated in neighbouring districts and forces put on alert.

As sanitary workers were cleaning up the area yesterday, they found the decomposed body of Thashthagir Malik entangled in a 5-metre-long sari - part of a massive pile of used clothing rejected by the tsunami victims.

A postmortem found the boy had died minutes after he was seen playing at the spot.