Man suffers severe burns after iPhone 6 explodes in his pocket

In a bizarre accident, a man in New South Wales suffered severe burns after his Apple iPhone 6 exploded in his back pocket while he was mountain biking.

Gareth Clear, 36, from Bondi in Australia, was riding around in New South Wales on Sunday when he fell off his bike and landed on his iPhone 6.

''Seconds later, he noticed smoke and a searing heat, before hearing an explosion as the phone he'd had for just six months ignited, melting through his shorts and two layers of skin on his upper right thigh,'' the Daily Telegraph reported. Due to the severity of the burns, Clear had to undergo skin graft surgery.

''It was a one in one million chance I hit a part of the phone which pierced the lithium battery and it exploded,'' Clear was quoted as saying. ''I am 36, I have had a mobile phone for 18 years of my life and for that thing to explode or short circuit and cause it to temporarily ignite. I could see the metal bending and all the lithium leaking out of the bottom end,'' he added.

He added that after the explosion, the base of the phone looked like ''something from a chemical explosion and the top remained perfectly intact''.

After the incident, Clear took to Twitter to spread the message about the dangers of lithium-ion batteries. "The more pervasive these are in our lives and  the more people use them with a lack of apprehension that something might go wrong, the more that these things will happen," he told technology website CNET.

Clear is not the first person to be involved incident of the type. In June 2015, one Kishan Yadav claimed that his iPhone 6 exploded during a hands-free phone call. He is said he escaped unhurt after he threw the device out of his car window.