Eight children were killed and 26 injured when students descending a crowded staircase after evening classes at a school in central China lost their footing amid a crush of bodies, state media and the local government reported today.
Students were rushing out of evening study sessions yesterday at Xiangxiang city's private Yucai Middle School when some lost their footing and began to fall on top of one another in a stampede on the steps.
More than 400 students had been exiting classrooms via an enclosed stairwell less than two metres wide, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
The dead were listed as seven boys and one girl, aged between 11 and 14, while eight other students were hospitalised with serious injuries, according to a local government notice and the official Xinhua News Agency.
CCTV footage shot five hours after the tragedy showed a puddle of blood in a corner of a landing in the darkened, tunnel-like stairwell.
"I just can't describe how I feel," school guidance counselor Chen Xinwei told the station. "You see these students so full of life and then they're just gone in an instant. There's just no way to process it."
A notice on the local government website posted today said three of the injured had already left hospital and the five others were in stable condition.
The head of the education bureau was immediately removed from his post for bearing "leadership responsibility" for the accident, the government said. The school's principal and chairman of its board of governors have been placed under a mild form of detention as part of the investigation, said a city government official.
The official said the education bureau has taken direct charge of the school's administration and had frozen its bank account.
Xinhua said the 12-year-old school has 3,500 students and is known as one of the city's best.
Such schools tend to have large class sizes but few emergency exits or other safety features. In addition to regular daytime classes, most feature evening revision sessions that are a standard requirement for advancement in China's grueling, exam-centred education system.
Despite harsh punishments aimed at forcing improvements, deadly stampedes continue to occur repeatedly in China's schools, usually as students are rushing to exams or charging out of class down tight corridors and narrow stairwells.
Yesterday's incident was among the deadliest since the crushing deaths of 21 children in a northern China middle school in 2002 after a railing collapsed as hundreds of children were funneling down a pitch-dark staircase after evening review classes.
In that case, the school principal and three other people were arrested and charged with gross negligence and other crimes.
AP