Boys playing PUBG Mobile run over by train in India

The two boys, both 14, were out on a walk on Saturday morning, say police officials

Two teenagers engrossed in playing popular mobile game PUBG died after they were run over by a train in northern India.

Police said a goods train on a railway track between the Mathura and Kasganj cities in the northern Uttar Pradesh state crushed the two boys on Saturday morning when they were out on a morning walk.

“We do not know exactly which train was passing when the accident took place,” Shashi Prakash Singh, a police officer of the Jamunapar police station, told news agency IANS.

Mr Singh added that while one of the phones had been damaged in the accident, the other still had the game running on it.

Police were called by passersby who noticed the bodies of the boys around 7am, a Times of India report said, adding there were no eyewitnesses.

The victims were identified as Gaurav Kumar and his neighbour Kapil Kumar, both 14-year-old students at different schools.

Gaurav studied at Guru Nanak Dev Public School, while Kapil was a student at the BGB Braj Education Academy Senior Secondary School.

Gaurav’s father, Rahul Kumar said it was his phone that was taken by his son on his morning walk. “Today was the first day of his walk and I wanted him to make it a routine, but now he is gone,” said Mr Kumar, who runs a dairy business.

The two boys lived about 100 metres away from each other, reports said.

“We have no idea about this online game. Had I been aware of it, I would have never given him a mobile phone,” said Kapil’s father Sanjay Kumar, a business owner.

The bodies have been sent for a post mortem.

PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) is an online multiplayer game that became hugely popular in India, and there have been several reports of deaths linked to the game.

The game was banned in India along with 117 other mostly Chinese-owned apps in the aftermath of the Galwan Valley clash, a border conflict between India and China. The game, however, made a return to India after South Korea’s Krafton bought the rights from Chinese Tencent and rebranded the game Battlegrounds Mobile India.