Two Girls Found Dead in Washing Machine

Two young girls, sisters, were found dead in a washing machine in China, according to local media reports.

The girls died of suffocation, a Global Times report said. But local media speculated that that they might have been murdered.

The two sisters were aged four and two. "The father found the girls curled up in the closed washing machine with a lot of blood when he saw the light on the washing machine was flickering,"said the children's grandfather, according to the paper.

"The girls were swollen and had bruises all over the body," the witness told an online Chinese news website. "There was a lot of blood in the washing machine."

The police ruled out any possibilities of foul play saying that the children's family had good relations with others.

Other media reports said that the mother of the girls was cooking and their father was busy with other work when the incident took place.

Online video footage shows an upright washing machine with a small chair placed next to it in the kitchen. The incident caught nationwide attention with people raising suspicions over the deaths.

"The chair was very high. How could the babies get on it? It could be an intentional murder, who believes it's not?" said one netizen on Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

China's Haier Group, the machine's manufacturer, said that the machine would not operate under the conditions that were reported, Global Times said. Haier had sent staff to help with the probe, the newspaper added.