21 dead in China school mishap, 7 held

Another 47 students were injured, suffering broken limbs and bruises as they toppled onto each other in the darkened stairwell at the school in the city of Fengzhen, 270 km from Beijing.

‘‘The reason for the accident was the poor quality of guard rails, which gave in before the staircase tilted downwards,’’ regional police spokesman Chen Jiangming said. ‘‘This has something to do with the construction quality of the building, which opened last year,’’ Chen said.

Hospital officials said the school had suffered a blackout, but Chen said the lights in the stairwell had not been working for some time. Five school officials, including its current and past presidents, and a construction company boss and local government quality inspection chief were held for questioning, he said.

The accident occurred as pupils at the No. 2 Middle School were heading home after classes, hospital officials said. ‘‘When they swarmed down stairs, suddenly the guardrail on the first floor stairs collapsed. Some of the students fell down, but students behind could not see what happened and continued to press forward,’’ one Fengzhen hospital official said.

‘‘Most of them died of respiratory failure caused by lack of oxygen as they toppled onto one another in the dark.’’ Others plunged nine to 12 feet into the stairwell of the three-storey school.

As word of the harrowing accident spread, panicked parents thronged the school and local hospitals. One man said his only child, Zhang Xiaoqing, 13, injured her waist as she was crushed by classmates falling on top of her. ‘‘She was just enrolled in the school and had been attending classes for only a couple of weeks,’’ her father, who would not give his first name, said from a local hospital.

Zhang rushed to the school to find it surrounded by police cars and cabs ferrying injured children to hospital and began to fear the worst when he couldn’t find his daughter. ‘‘Then my family called saying that my child was already in Fengzhen hospital, so I rushed there to find it overwhelmed by children and their parents,’’ he said.

A tight security cordon surrounded the school. ‘‘No one is allowed in there — it is heavily guarded by police,’’ he said.

Many children were in shock, said a doctor at a Jinning hospital where some injured had been taken. ‘‘The children were scared. When we asked about the accident, they wouldn’t say and some couldn’t even remember,’’ he said. ‘‘Twenty one of their schoolmates died. This is a big blow to them.’’ (Reuters)