Ahmedabad: As many as nine children died at the Government Civil Hospital in the city in one single day on Saturday, official sources said.

According to initial reports, the children breathed their last at Intensive Care Unit of the hospital. Five of them had been shifted from other hospitals in the state, while four were born in Ahmedabad.

Police force was deployed at the hospital to prevent untoward incident by angry relatives of the children.

Denying reports that the children died because of absence of doctors, Civil Hospitals' Medical Superintendent M.M. Prabhakar told a Gujarati TV channel: "We always have doctors present 24 hours."

He claimed the patients could have been sent to the Civil Hospital when their condition deteriorated. "This happens often. When private hospitals realize that the patients could not be treated, they would send them here," he said.