Doubts raised after 2 girls found dead in washing machine in Jiangxi

Police from a county in Jiangxi Province are investigating a case involving two little girls who on Saturday died in a washing machine at their home.
 
According to Xinhua, police in Xinjian county have ruled out murder, partly due to the good relationships within the family and the fact that there were no signs indicating homicide. Police also confirmed that the two girls died of suffocation.
 
A shopkeeper in Xinjian told the Jiangxi-based news portal jxgdw.com that the older girl, surnamed Tu, was nearly 4 years old and the younger one was only 2. They also had a 1-year-old brother.
 
Their parents, who started looking after the children full-time this year, moved back to their old house in a nearby village after the two girls died.
 
"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. Five minutes before the parents realized the girls had disappeared, they heard a sound in the sitting-room, where the two girls were playing, while the father was watching TV in his room and the mother was cooking," the children's grandfather was quoted as saying by jxgdw.com.
 
A relative of the two little girls called a police officer, who was also an acquaintance, on Monday morning, asking police to check whether the tragedy was due to a malfunction in the washing machine.
 
The Haier Group, the manufacturer of the washing machine, said the machine would not run under the conditions reported, according to an announcement posted on its official Sina Weibo account. Haier has sent staff to Xinjian to help with the investigation.
 
According to a Monday report on local website jxnews.com.cn, local police and reporters from the website tested the washing machine, and found that in two out of three tests the machine would automatically start to run 52 seconds after the cover closed.
 
One netizen asked whether the children's weight was more than 24 kilograms, much heavier than the weight limit of a common washing machine.
 
Others questioned whether the washing function can operate without water, and wondered whether the drying function had begun so the children had no time to close the cover.
 
A witness who helped send the children to hospital said that the scene was heartbreaking, according to the report on jxgdw.com.
 
"The girls were swollen and had bruises all over the body. There was a lot of blood in the washing machine," the witness said, adding that the mother fainted when hearing about the death of the two children.