A three-year-old boy has died after being run over by a tractor in the Murasumoddai area of Kilinochchi, police said.
The child and his brother had been playing on the trailer of a tractor parked at their home when a relative started the vehicle and attempted to turn it around within the yard, with the children still on the trailer.
The boy fell from the trailer and was run over by one of the tractor’s rear wheels. He was taken to Kilinochchi District General Hospital with serious injuries and later died there.
The driver of the tractor has been arrested. Kilinochchi Police are conducting further investigations.
Timing
Ada Derana’s English report placed the incident on Friday without specifying a time. The outlet’s Tamil edition, filing earlier on Saturday morning, said it happened on Friday night.
The two accounts otherwise match on the sequence of events, the arrest and the investigating division. The Tamil report referred to the hospital simply as Kilinochchi Hospital.
An off-road death that will not reach the traffic count
The death happened on private property rather than a public road, which places it outside the national road accident statistics that police publish. Those figures recorded 1,749 deaths in 1,654 fatal accidents in the year to date, a tally announced this week.
It was the second fatal tractor case reported on Friday. Earlier the same day, five people were killed in Monaragala when a tipper truck struck a tractor at Kumbukkana carrying a group of ten on its trailer to the Kebilitta shrine.
Police did not say whether the relative who started the vehicle is the same person described as the arrested driver.
