Three children aged three to five were killed when soil and rocks fell from a hillside on an indoor playground in Hanoi’s Ba Vi District Sunday night.

At around 10:20 p.m., after more than an hour of heavy rain, an unexpected landslide occurred, with the debris falling on a children's play area owned by Tran Van Viet in Ba Trai Commune, causing a 10-meter-long wall to collapse.

The soil filled the play area, burying the three children.

The five-year-old was Viet’s child and the other two, aged three, were neighbors’ kids.

Rescuers extricated their bodies by 11:30 p.m.

Due to the heavy rain the two neighbors’ children were unable to go home and stayed at Viet’s to play with his child.

A cold air mass moving down from China and the effects of a convergence zone of winds at altitudes of 1,500-3,000 meters caused heavy downpours in many places in Hanoi on Sunday.