Bhopal, Oct. 10: Four-year-old Afsar must have pulled up a blanket at night. Mandsaur and the adjourning areas of Nimar region have seen the temperature falling below 20 degrees and the nights now tend to be nippy.

In the morning, his extended family ? relatives had come over to celebrate a cousin?s engagement ceremony ? folded up their mattresses and blankets and piled them on top of him by mistake in their two-room house in the lowbrow Narayanpur area.

At breakfast, when Afsar?s mother raised an alarm, a frantic search began. The boy was found under the pile, his life snuffed out by suffocation.

Afsar, the youngest of four siblings, was rushed to Shastri hospital. However, doctors at the hospital declared him dead.

Within hours, celebration had turned into mourning. Afsar?s mother is so shocked she has fainted several times and has been put on sedatives.

The incident in Mandsaur is the epitome of a series of bizarre deaths involving little children that has spooked Madhya Pradesh.

In Damoh district, about 150 km northeast of Bhopal, police are clueless after discovering the charred body of nine-year-old Deepa and that of Vikas, who was one-and-a-half-years old.

The two went missing on October 2 while playing near their house in Narsinghgarh. Some villagers have hinted at the possibility of family rivalry.

In Mahakaushal region?s Balaghat district, four members of a family were found buried in their house at Vivekananda Colony.

Neighbours said Mukesh Namdev, his wife Archana and young children Ashi and Shivam were nowhere to be found. The worried couple informed the police.

The police personnel broke into the house only to find the bodies of the children in a seven-and-a-half-foot pit neighbours said the landlord had ordered dug a few days ago. The police are now questioning the landlord.

Bhopal recently woke to a gory story in the newspapers ? a young boy murdered his father after reportedly catching him abusing his sister.

Kallu, 17, crushed an inebriated Maniram Prajapati with a heavy stone when he apparently made sexual advances towards his 14-year-old daughter. Maniram?s wife told the police her husband was a drug addict too.