Mother, 7-year-old son found charred to death at home

Kolkata: Mystery shrouds the death of a middle-aged woman and her seven-year-old son, whose charred bodies were found in their house at Liluah in Howrah on Friday morning.

Police said local people found smoke billowing out of a room in their house on Friday early morning. They informed the police. Policemen from the local police station went to the spot.

Local people had already initiated the work to douse the flames.

Later, firefighters joined the work to extinguish the fire. One fire tender was also pressed into service to douse the flames. The firefighters took around an hour to extinguish the fire that broke out in the room which was situated in the first floor of the two-storeyed building.

The firefighters entered the room and found the woman, Mita Chandra, and her son, Mainak, with severe burn injuries. They took them to a local hospital where they were declared brought dead.

Police initiated a probe in this connection and came to know that the woman used to stay with her son in the house for the past five years after her husband mysteriously went missing.

The police are, however, yet to ascertain whether there was any foul play behind the incident. The police collected samples from the spot.

A police officer said that they are trying to find whether the incident is an outcome of anyone's rivalry with the woman.

The investigating officers would be going through the call record details of the woman's mobile phone to find if she had received any suspicious call in the past few days.

The police also spoke to her neighbours who told them that they didn't find anything suspicious in her behaviour and she spoke quite normally when they met her on Thursday evening when she was bringing her son back from his tuition.

The police have also contacted the victim's relatives to know whether she had been suffering from depression for the past few days.