Bhubaneswar: Three children, aged between three and five, drowned while they were reportedly trying to pluck lily flowers from a pond at Jhadeswar village under Bhadreswar police station area in Cuttack district on Sunday.“The deceased belonged to two families. Two of the victims, aged three and five, were siblings, while the third child was four years old,” SP (Cuttack rural) Vinit Agrawal said.According to police sources, the children were playing near their homes before they wandered to the nearby pond. When they did not return home, their family members started searching for them and their bodies were later found in the pond.Police reached the spot and sent the bodies for a postmortem examination. Preliminary investigation indicates that the children slipped into the water and drowned. “We have conducted the postmortem and handed over the bodies to their families,” a police officer said.