By ISABELLA NIKOLIC and WILL STEWART FOR MAILONLINE
A pregnant shop assistant was strangled by her own hair during a job interview after it got tangled in a factory machine which tore her scalp off.
Umida Nazarova, 21, was applying for a new job at the Svarmet factory in Borisov, Belarus, which produces welding wire and electrodes, when senior staff members showed her round the factory.
During the tour her loose hair suddenly got caught in a machine and wrapped around her neck and she became trapped and covered in blood.
Her mother Olga said: ‘Her throat was injured, according to the doctor. Her hair got wrapped around her neck and she was pulled into the mechanism.
‘If her scalp had not been torn off, she would have been strangled there and then by her own hair.
Despite this she still suffered fatal injuries, and never regained consciousness.
Her father Dmitry said safety rules were broken. He said: ‘They took two lives, she was seven weeks pregnant.
‘They saw she had long hair, so why didn’t they give her something to cover it?’
The Belarus Investigative Committee said: ‘An employee, who was showing her how the equipment operates, paused to make a record in a register.
‘When she turned her head, she saw the woman already lying on the floor unconscious, her hair was tangled in the machine.’
The plant paid for the woman’s funeral.
‘She wanted to become a mother,’ said Olga.
‘We wanted to celebrate her wedding, and collect a grandson or granddaughter from the hospital, not this.
‘This is not what I wanted for my child.’
A court has sentenced an unnamed plant head of production for ‘failure to fulfil her official duties due to dishonest and negligent attitude…causing the death of a person’.
