Polish man hangs himself while on video chat site

WARSAW (Reuters) - A young Polish man hanged himself in front of a Web camera while linked to other Internet users, a district prosecutor said Tuesday.

"The local police department got a call (from another participant) saying one of the users of the video chat site was motionless and in a strange position. When the police arrived the man was dead," prosecutor Tadeusz Halas told Reuters.

"His parents, completely unaware of this tragedy, were sleeping in another room of the apartment," he added.

Halas said the man had been drinking with friends a few hours earlier to mark his 27th birthday.

"He told them he had prepared a surprise for his birthday but they said he seemed very strange and depressed," Halas said, adding that an autopsy would be conducted Tuesday.

The incident occurred Sunday night in Zagorz, a small town in impoverished southeast Poland.

(Reporting by Dagmara Leszkowicz, writing by Gareth Jones, editing by Jon Boyle)