Four-year-old girl among those killed in Ukrainian drone attack, says Russia

(Reuters) -A four-year-old girl was among three people killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on a village in Russia's southern Belgorod region which left her father in a coma and her mother seriously injured, Russia said on Thursday.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Belgorod region, said debris from the drone had destroyed one house and that three bodies - of a man, a woman, and a child - had been recovered from under the rubble. Two other houses had been damaged.

It was not immediately clear who the dead man and woman were or whether they were related to the child.

Dmitry Kiselyov, director general of state media group Russia Today, was cited by the RIA news agency as saying that Khaybar Akifi, a 29-year-old man who worked for the Sputnik news agency, had been seriously injured in the incident along with his wife Olesya.

Amina, the couple's four-year-old daughter, had been killed, he said.

"There was a huge tragedy: she lost her parents and the family lost a child," Kiselyov said in a statement.

Reuters could not independently verify the details of the incident and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Kyiv, which is regularly targeted by Russian drones and missiles, has launched increasingly frequent drone and missile attacks on targets in southern Russia and in Russia-annexed Crimea.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn/Ron Popeski; Editing by Sandra Maler, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Gareth Jones)