A brother and sister, Asif and Sathi Akter, drowned in a pond beside their home at Kekupara in Chaklahat union of Panchagarh Sadar upazila on Sunday 31 May 2026. Local people believed the two children fell into the water while trying to pick mangoes from a tree on the bank of the pond.
A search that began in the evening
Jagonews24 and Ekhon TV reported Asif's age as 11 and Sathi Akter's as 9; Dhaka Post gave their ages as 12 and 10. Their father had died, and the children lived with their mother, who supported the family by working as a labourer.
On that Sunday their mother went to work as usual. When she came home in the evening and could not find her son and daughter, she began searching, and family members and local people joined in. According to Dhaka Post, at about 8 pm Asif's body was seen floating in the pond next to the house. Local people then went into the pond to search, and about an hour later Sathi's body was recovered from the same pond.
Chaklahat is one of the ten unions of Panchagarh Sadar upazila, in Panchagarh district of Rangpur division. The upazila borders the Indian state of West Bengal to the north and east, covers 347.08 square kilometres and had a population of 335,366 in the 2022 census.
What local representatives and the police said
Confirming the deaths, Chaklahat Union Parishad chairman Rabiul Islam told Jagonews24 that he believed the children fell into the water while trying to pick mangoes from the mango tree on the bank of the pond.
Local Union Parishad member Mozammel Haque told Dhaka Post that the bodies of the brother and sister had been recovered from the pond beside their home, and called the incident very tragic.
Ashraful Islam, officer-in-charge of Panchagarh Sadar police station, confirmed to Ekhon TV that the two children had drowned. He said the bodies were handed over to the family after the inquest, and that a case of unnatural death had been recorded at the police station.
Why children are at risk around water
According to the World Health Organization's drowning fact sheet of 1 May 2026, there are around 300,000 drowning deaths worldwide each year, and 92 percent of them occur in low- and middle-income countries. Drowning is the fourth leading cause of death for children aged 1 to 4 years and the third for children aged 5 to 14.
The WHO explains that young children are at particular risk because their ability to judge danger is still developing and they lack swimming and water safety skills, and that the risk rises when children are near water without active adult supervision. In low- and middle-income countries, everyday use of ponds, rivers and lakes for bathing and washing clothes also raises the risk. The measures the WHO recommends include:
- Covering wells, using doorway barriers and playpens, and otherwise controlling access to water hazards.
- Community-based, supervised childcare for pre-school children.
- Teaching school-age children basic swimming, water safety and safe rescue skills, in a safe training area and with proper safety rules.
Photo: Ibrahim Husain Meraj / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sources: Jagonews24, Ekhon TV, Dhaka Post, World Health Organization (WHO), Wikipedia
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