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Source: The Daily Star

Two brothers from Dhaka’s Bashundhara Residential Area are thought to have died from pesticide poisoning after a cleaning service used pest control in their home.

Shayan Mobarrat Zahin, who was 15 and in grade 8 at an English speaking school, and Shahir Mobarrat Zayan, who was 9 and in grade 3 there, both died on Sunday.

Asaduzzaman, who is in charge of the Bhatara Police Station, said today that they think the two boys may have died because they ate too much pesticide.

Inspector (Investigation) Shariful Islam said that family members told him that the father of the two children, Mobarak Hossain, hired DCS Organisation Ltd to get rid of pests in the house at Block-I.

“On Friday from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., workers of the company put down pesticides there. Mobarak told The Daily Star yesterday, “I was there supervising the work while my wife and three children were out at an event.”

He said that the workers told them to come back in two to three hours. But the family members took extra care and came back to the house about 10 hours later.

The officer said that everyone in the family got sick, but the kids had to be rushed to a private hospital nearby. The officer said that Zayan died there on Sunday morning, and Zahin died later that night.

He said that they are thought to have died because the chemicals made them sick.

Police say that their sister is still getting care at the hospital.

The family members and relatives said that the event happened because the pest control service had “incompetent” workers.

When this reporter called the company that does cleaning and pest control, an unnamed man said that an expert team that worked at the house is now at the Bhatara Police Station.

The deputy commissioner of the Gulshan Division Police, Md Shohidullah, said that they let the family bury the body of one child without doing an autopsy.

The body of the other child was taken to the Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College morgue so that it could be examined.

When asked, the father said he didn’t know what happened on Sunday morning to kill his older son. So he went to the funeral without having the body examined.

But when his second son died, he realized that the chemicals the service provider used might have had something to do with it.

Sources at the morgue said that they think the boy died from being poisoned by pesticides. When the report from the forensic lab comes out, they said, we’ll know more.

No case had been filed with any of the police stations in the capital as of 10 p.m., when this story was written.