A toddler has died after being ‘forgotten’ and left on a nursery minibus for around seven hours amid searing temperatures in Portugal.
The 18-month-old girl was present in a ‘critical condition’ contained in the vehicle in Almada on the southern bank of the Tagus River directly opposite the capital Lisbon just before 4pm yesterday.
Paramedics desperately tried to revive her, but she was declared dead on the scene.
The girl, named only as Sofia, was handed over to a employee at around 8am and was presupposed to have been taken to her day care centre, her grandmother said.
It appears the alarm was only raised by her mum when she went to choose her up within the afternoon and realised she was not there.
The van was reportedly parked in an avenue called Avenida do Cristo Rei front of a special facility to the one Sofia attended.
Enroll for all of the newest stories
Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
Her grandmother told Portuguese tabloid Correio da Manha: ‘We don’t know why my granddaughter was left in a van at this institution, which isn’t hers.
‘The one who had the van killed my granddaughter.’
The creche the van belonged to has been named locally as Colegio Mestre Cuco.
Temperatures across the time the alarm was raised this afternoon in Almada were around 27°C.
There have been no reports of any arrests to date, although Portugal’s Policia Judiciaria police force have been mobilised to take charge of the investigation.
Two children aged two and 4 were found dead of their family’s automobile within the town of Carpentras in southeastern France last month as Europe suffered a ferocious heatwave.
In September 2023, a baby girl called Madalena died after being left in a automobile on a Portuguese university campus for several hours in 26 degree heat.
The ten-month-old child’s father, described on the time locally as a lecturer and departmental head on the campus near Lisbon, is believed to have forgotten to drop her off at its creche before going to work and leaving her within the vehicle.
He reportedly called 999 after realising his error and discovering the teen unconscious contained in the automobile.
Efforts to revive her proved unsuccessful and he or she was pronounced dead on the scene.
The unnamed father is alleged to have parked the family SEAT Ateca automobile by the campus creche around 8am on September 12, 2023, before going to work at his office within the Nova School of Science and Technology, a school of the NOVA University Lisbon positioned on the Caparica Campus in Almada a half-hour drive south of the Portuguese capital.
In May last 12 months a three-year-old boy died in a well-liked Spanish tourist town after being found trapped inside a parked automobile in eighty degree heat.
Emergency responders including police and paramedics were sent to the scene after a 999 call from a member of the general public.
They tried to revive him for several minutes after freeing him from the vehicle and discovering he didn’t have a heartbeat.
The kid was then rushed to a neighborhood hospital where he was certified dead.
The drama happened in Linares within the Andalucian province of Jaen, home to the Andres Segovia House Museum dedicated to celebrated classical guitarist Andrés Segovia.
The town is near Baeza and Ubeda that are each UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Get in contact with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: My honest review of Lisbon’s newest hotel that’s all about color
MORE: These are Europe’s most beautiful islands for food, weather and scenery