Explosion of mobile phone battery kills 8-year-old girl in India

The explosion of the Redmi Note 5 Pro smartphone has killed an eight-year-old girl in the village of Thiruvilvamala in the south of India, Asianet News reports.

"Forensic examination showed that the phone was not charging at that moment. The cause of death was an explosion of the battery inside the mobile device as a result of overheating," the newspaper notes.

Eight-year-old Adityashree Kumar's father, Ashok Kumar, said that the girl was at home with her grandmother at the time of the explosion.

The grandmother told the police that at the time of the explosion, the child was lying down and covered with a blanket, under which she was playing with the smartphone.

The grandmother went to the kitchen for a moment, then she heard an explosion and when she came back, she saw the injured granddaughter on the bed.

According to experts, overheating occurred because the phone was under the blanket. The source also states that the phone's battery was deformed. The fragments of the exploded phone were collected for detailed examination.

Earlier in January this year, in one of the houses in the state of Ohio, US, an iPhone 4 that was being charged caught fire while the whole family was asleep. The camera installed in the kitchen recorded how the fire extinguished itself shortly after it started. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Lithium-ion batteries are widely used in electronics and batteries rarely catch fire, but sometimes rechargeable batteries overheat and catch fire.