Fang Lin Village -- Jiangxi Province China
It should have been just their classroom.
Instead, it became their grave.

-- Children who died when their school exploded in southeast China were forced to make fireworks in class, their parents said Thursday. The father of an 11-year-old victim said he was among the first to arrive at the scene and saw dead children in the rubble still clutching fuses in their hands.

State media said 42 people were killed and 27 injured. Parents gave figures of between 53 and more than 60 - four of them teachers, the rest children. Many bodies were dismembered. Parts of one boy were found in a nearby river, said the father of a 9-year-old who died.

Chinese Premier blamed a man with mental problems for Tuesday's explosion, which reduced the school in Fang Lin village, Jiangxi province, to a pile of bricks, books and furniture. The official News Agency identified him as a   33-year-old fireworks maker, and said he was known in the village as "psycho."

It said police found a notebook and papers in his home containing the confused phrase: "I'll sacrifice myself with 100 pounds of silver saltpeter, blast all, burn all, killing dozens of them at the very least."

A father said his 11-year-old son, who died, and other third- and fourth-graders had since 1998 been forced to assemble firecrackers in class, normally working a half-day.

The father of another 11-year-old victim said children were rushing to complete orders for China's traditional grave-sweeping festival on April 5, whenfamilies honor deceased relatives.

"Everybody knows it is caused by the fireworks," The father  said by telephone. "They are trying to cover the facts. Please do not believe them."

The explosion was not the first to kill children in China's fireworks industry. Last March, 17 children - the youngest aged 8 - were among 35 people killed when a fireworks factory exploded in another Jiangxi village about 30 miles from Tuesday's blast. The children earned 12 cents a day for fitting fuses to firecrackers, the state-run newspaper reported.

In poor villages all along Jiangxi's mountainous border with Hunan province, fireworks are a key industry. Most are put together by hand in family workshops for sale nationwide.

In Fang Lin, about 30 families make fireworks at home, including the village's Communist Party leader and some school officials and teachers, said a father , whose 11-year-old son was killed in Tuesday's blast.

Dozens of children die

-- Four classrooms collapsed in the explosion.

A massive explosion that demolished a Chinese primary school killing dozens of children was caused by fireworks, officials have confirmed.

Reports suggest the school was using pupils as young as eight years old to assemble fireworks to boost its income.

At least 37 children and four teachers were killed in the blast in a remote rural region in eastern China.

Some witnesses put the death toll at about 60. Nearly all the victims are believed to have been young children.

The school in Fang Lin village, Jiangxi province, was packed with about 300 pupils and teachers when the blast ripped through the two-storey building at 1110 (0310 GMT) on Tuesday, destroying four classrooms.

Witnesses and Chinese website reports said pupils at the school regularly assembled firecrackers for a local factory.    They said the explosion was caused by a faulty fuse.

Sources told the news agency that children as young as eight years old were forced to make fireworks at the school, 700km (440 miles) south-west of Shanghai.

The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights in China said the school used the fireworks business to boost its income.

Local officials say investigations are continuing, but one said criminal charges were likely to be brought against those involved.

 Children were dug from the wreckage and taken to hospital.

The BBC in Shanghai says Jiangxi is one of China's poorest provinces, and funding shortages have often prompted rural schools to seek alternative ways of generating income.

More than 30 people died in an explosion at a fireworks factory in the same province last year and similar accidents are believed to claim hundreds of lives each year.

Military units have joined the rescue efforts and the provincial governor flew back from Beijing, where he was attending China's annual parliament session, to supervise the operation.

The extent of poverty in the region was emphasised when phone calls to the local fire brigade were met with a recorded message, saying the number had been disconnected because phone bills had not been paid.

Rescue work has been hampered by the remote location of the village - emergency personnel say their mobile phones do not work.

Fireworks school yields its dead

-- Chinese soldiers combed through dusty heaps of rafters, bricks and children's books in a search for clues into a schoolhouse explosion that killed at least 41 people, many of them children.

Local officials contacted by telephone denied reports that students were assembling fireworks at the time of the blast.

However, the debris was littered with firecracker wrapping papers, said a man who answered the phone at the local fire brigade and identified himself only by his surname.     He said that 37 of the dead were students and the other four were teachers.     "The dead bodies all look very terrible, many of them incomplete," he said.      He declined to give more information, saying the cause of the explosion was still under investigation.

The United Nations' Children's Fund expressed "deep regret and outrage" at the deaths and at reports that children as young as 8-years-old were assembling fireworks because of a funding shortfall at the school.

In a statement issued at U.N. headquarters in New York, UNICEF called on China and the rest of the world to redouble efforts to address the issues of child labor and under-funded schools.

There were about 190 people in the two-story building when the blast hit Tuesday morning in Fang Lin village, said a member of the rescue team who also gave only her surname.

Rescuers spent most of Wednesday sifting through the rubble.

Fang Lin is in Jiangxi province, in southeastern China, about 768 kilometers (480 miles) southwest of Shanghai.

Most of the building was blown away, exposing an upper-story classroom with desks and blackboard intact.

She said most of those in the building were third- and fourth-grade students studying in four classrooms.

China has suffered a string of explosions and collapses of public buildings, including schools. The disasters are often caused by shoddy construction and poor safety standards; particularly in the fireworks industry, which includes both large-scale plants and small, unlicensed workshops run by farmers as a source of extra cash.

Fireworks are a key industry in Wan Zai and nearby counties, said a Wan Zai county spokeswoman.

A map of the region published by the Jiangxi provincial government used a picture of exploding fireworks to symbolize the local specialty.

A local police official, who declined to give his name, strongly denied fireworks caused the blast, saying, "Besides investigating the cause of the accident, we will also investigate who fabricated the rumor."

Information from the village in mountainous western Jiangxi was scant. The area is so remote that mobile phones carried by the rescue team were outside network range, said a county official.

The official News Agency said 27 people were injured. A doctor reached by telephone at Wan Zai County People's Hospital said a person died during the night, but he would not give his name and county officials could not immediately confirm the additional death.

Jiangxi's governor rushed back to the province from Beijing, where he was attending the annual meeting of China's legislature.

And the truth triumphed.

-- The classic example happened when there was an explosion at a fireworks factory where children were being forced to assemble firecrackers as young as 3rd and 4th graders in this school. The official Chinese line was that a suicide bomber had entered a fireworks factory and detonated an explosion. They were forced to acknowledge that the "Factory" was in reality a school which employed child labor to build fireworks. Through modern communications the reality was out instantly all across China and the truth triumphed.

Truth About Jiangxi School Building
Collapse Known

A villager named Li Chuicai with mental disease detonated the explosion in a primary school building in Waizai County in east China's Jiangxi Province, local police said.

The blast came at around 11 o'clock on Tuesday morning, and it destroyed the school building and killed 42 and injured 27 people.

The case therefore is a criminal one, local police concluded, adding that evidence in four aspects have been found.

First, the suspect, Li Chuicai, 33, had the very motive, said Xu Xiaogang, deputy director with the Jiangxi Provincial Public Security Bureau.

Police found a notebook and a sheet of paper in Li's home. On some paper it wrote something like "I will sacrifice myself... blast all burn all...at least to kill scores of them...all is over ", which shown clearly that the suspect had the intention to set off explosion in a crowded place.

The words, in logic confusion, reflected that Li was mentally sick. Actually, Li's fellow villagers called him psycho as well.

Second, after a careful examination of chemicals like chlorate left by the explosion, police found that they were the same with those found in Li's home. Li started making fireworks when he was 18 years old, and he is able to make chlorate fireworks on his own.

Third, four witnesses were found who saw Li riding in the direction of the primary school carrying plastic pockets obviously with something in them.

And after Li entered the school, Deng Chengbao and other two teachers and seven students saw the whole process of the explosion that he initiated.

Lastly, autopsy results of Li's body showed that he was at the very center of explosion, which tallies with testimonies given by teachers and students.

Considering that all the material evidence and witnesses' testimonies all coincide with each other, experts who joined the investigation concluded that the evidence is adequate to prove Li as the suspect for setting off the explosion.

 

Aftermath Well Handled

The injured are being rescued and the dead were pacified in Wanzai County in east China's Jiangxi province where an explosion destroyed a primary school building, killing 42 and injuring 27.

Around 11 o'clock Tuesday morning, Villager Li Chuicai, 33, broken into a grade-three classroom and detonated two pockets of fireworks, causing four rooms of the two-story brick school building to collapse.

Local public security officers and firemen rushed to the spot to rescue victims immediately after the explosion.

Zhang Lingen, a grade-three student, however, was missing until this afternoon when firemen spotted two legs which Zhang's parents had recognized as their son's.

So far, 22 of the 27 injured are out of danger, and the rest five are given around-the-clock monitoring.

Burial of the 42 dead are being arranged, and pension has been allocated to comfort their families. All insurance have been already distributed to the families of the dead.

Local government is now looking for the site for a temporary school building as the old one was severely damaged in the blast.

Officials said that normal education can be resumed very soon.

It was also decided that all the slightly injured students be given a health check.

The explosion aroused great attention among senior officials. Shu Shengyou, governor of Jiangxi Province, who was then attending the on-going session of the National People's Congress in Beijing, and other leading officials of the related departments at state or provincial level, flew back to Jiangxi to direct the rescue work and handle the aftermath.