Man and his mother were attempting to find a phone his wife had dropped into an open-pit toilet, helped by four other people

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A man and his mother have died trying to retrieve his wife's new mobile phone from a toilet septic tank in China.

The woman had dropped her device – worth 2,000 yuan (£190) – in the open-pit toilet, reported Dahe, a website run by the Henan provincial government.

Her husband jumped in to try to find the phone but was overcome by fumes and passed out, it said.

His mother went in to the cesspit to try to help her son, but also fainted, prompting the woman and her father-in-law to enter in turn.

Two neighbours then entered the tank and also became ill.

Villagers in Xinxiang, in central China, used ropes to retrieve the six people from the tank, which online images showed to be accessed via a brick-built hole measuring one metre square.

"In five minutes, two lives have gone and my daughter-in-law is unconscious, leaving a half-paralysed elderly man and a one-year-old grandson," the husband's distraught uncle said, according to Dahe. "How are we supposed to go on?"