Manama: An eight-year-old boy was killed when his head got trapped in an automatic trash compactor in a mall in Saudi Arabia.
The incident that occurred on Saturday at 3pm was witnessed by the boy’s mother who became hysterical as she attempted to free her son from the machine.
Shoppers rushed to provide assistance to the devastated mother and laid the boy on the floor while blood was gushing from his head wounds.
A witness told Saudi daily Okaz that a member of the boy’s family came to the scene, lifted him and headed to the car park to drive him to a nearby clinic.
Another witness said that shoppers heard the screams of a woman and upon reaching her they saw her try to rescue a boy who had his head caught in a trash bin.
Two other witnesses said that they arrived to see a boy laid on the floor of the mall with his head covered in blood. The mother was screaming and everyone was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Khalid and Ammar were quoted as saying by Okaz on Sunday.
Muneera Al Ebrahim, another shopper, said that she saw the mother holding her son tightly while her black coverall — abaya- was soaked in blood.
“The mother was telling her son ‘Don’t leave Mama’ while some women were splashing her face with water to calm her,” she said.
Other witnesses said the trash bins did not have labels warning that they worked automatically and that people needed to be careful, the daily added.
Ali Al Amri, a security official at the mall, said that a rotating surveillance camera recorded a young boy playing alone in the area and that after three rotations, it showed a woman holding an unconscious boy and screaming for assistance.
The security operations room received a call from a security man at the site of the incident reporting that a boy got his head trapped inside an automatic trash compactor, Al Amri said.
“The Red Crescent operations room was alerted immediately, and in the meantime a man reached the incident site, carried the boy and rushed downstairs towards the nearest exit. He was still breathing at [the] time and the blood was still coming out of his head. The paramedics arrived, applied the first-aid procedures and took the boy to a private clinic near the mall,” he said.
Al Amri said that 10 minutes had elapsed between the time of the incident and the ambulance operations.
“Security men came to the mall and investigated the area where the tragedy happened. I gave them a report with all details as well as a copy of the panoramic surveillance camera recordings,” he said.
According to Al Amri, the mall had 10 automatic trash compactors that were installed eight years earlier.
He said that they were safe to use and that the compactor would be set into motion only if the trash deposit opening was fully shut.
