The corpse of a 6-year-old boy was found floating in a water tank on top of a residential building in Minzhi Subdistrict, Bao'an District, on Saturday afternoon, the latest in a series of drowning accidents involving young children in Shenzhen recently, the Daily Sunshine reported yesterday.

Zhu Penghui went missing Saturday afternoon, but it was not until three hours had passed that his parents noticed he was gone. The security guard at the building entrance said he hadn't seen Zhu leave the building that afternoon. An examination of the closed circuit television (CCTV) footage of the building also showed that Zhu was somewhere inside the building. The couple thought that Zhu had been abducted, and reported him missing to police.

Later in the afternoon, the boy's sandals were found beside the water tank on the building's roof by a technician. Zhu's parents arrived at the scene and confirmed that the sandals belonged to their son. And they saw Zhu's body was floating in the water.

Zhu's stepfather, identified only by his surname Chen, said that Zhu had been able to climb up to the top of the tank using one of two ladders which normally should have been kept under lock and key. He also pointed out that the tank cover had been removed, which allowed Zhu to fall into the tank.

The building's property management office explained that they had removed the tank cover ahead of a regular cleanup of the water tank, which had been delayed by storms that hit Shenzhen in recent days.

In a separate accident, a 10-year-old boy drowned in a pond near a quarry in Xili, Nanshan District, early Saturday. The boy, only identified as Zeng, was swimming in the pond with seven friends.

Editor: Yan