A family’s three-year-old twins have died in India after drowning in a washing machine when their mother left the house for a matter of minutes.

The twin boys, named locally as Nishant and Nakshya, were found by their father in the family’s washing machine after he and his wife had spent over half an hour looking for them at their home in Rohini, Delhi, on Saturday.

The boys’ mother, named by local media as Rakhi, had filled the washing machine with 12-15 litres of water earlier in the day and had left the twins playing together in the house at around 12:30pm.

She had stepped out momentarily to buy washing detergent, the Hindustan Times reported. When she returned around “six minutes later” she could not find the children and a neighbour called the police.

The children’s father, named only as Ravinder, immediately returned home to help with the search and found the children in the washing machine.

“Mr Ravinder immediately took the children to a nearby family hospital where doctors declared them dead,” a senior police official told IANS news agency. “Shocked father could not believe and took [the children] to Jaipur Golden Hospital where doctors declared them dead,” he added.

The mother told police she had left piles of clothes next to the washing machine. Police said the children may have climbed onto the clothes to look inside the top-loading machine and accidentally fallen in.

“It appears that one of the kids first climbed the heap [of clothes] to see what was inside the machine and fell inside head on,” MN Tiwari, the deputy commissioner of police in Rohini, said. “The second child must have followed his brother. Since both of them fell head on, they were choked. There was no way they could have come out,” he said.

The couple’s third child, a 10-year-old, was reportedly at school at the time of the incident.

“The family is inconsolable,” a senior police officer told NDTV.