Woman electrocuted while charging phone in bath
A 20-year-old woman has been electrocuted after using her mobile in the bath.
The Russian woman, named only as Anastasia, was found dead by her grief-stricken mother holding the phone in one hand and the bath plug in the other.
She called out to her daughter but there was no reply.
The mother saw the light on under the bathroom door and went in.
“I saw Nastya (Anastasia) lying in an empty bath,” she said.
“In one hand she was holding her mobile phone plugged into the socket, and in the other she had a bath plug.
“I thought she was alive but unconscious.
“Paramedics came very quickly but they could only register the death of my daughter.”
She died from a severe electric shock, reports say.
Her death in southern Moscow is the latest in a series of recent tragic fatalities of young females in Russia from charging their mobiles while taking baths – despite warnings from the authorities.
In another case last month, an unnamed 12-year-old girl in the Arctic city of Norilsk died while using her phone in the bath.
The electrocuted girl was found by her mother when she came home from a nightshift.
She was lying in the water, her mobile phone next to her with its cord in the power socket, reports say.
A week earlier Yulia Vysotskaya, 14, from Cheboksary, died when her phone slipped out of her hands in the bath.
Her devastated parents “called an ambulance but paramedics were only able to register the schoolgirl’s death and take her body to the morgue,” said one report.
In December Russian martial arts champion Irina Rybnikova, 15, died instantly when using her iPhone plugged into a charger while in the bath at her home in Bratsk, Siberia.
The teenager was a champion fighter in pankration – a form of “no rules” boxing and wrestling originating in ancient Greece.
Warnings have been issued of the dangers of phones near baths.
Electronics engineer Andrey Stanovsky has warned that “relaxing in a bathroom with your mobile phone plugged is like playing Russian roulette”.
Yury Agrafonov, the head of radio-electronic department of Irkutsk State University, said water was a good conductor.
Australscope
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