YANSHANPU - Thirteen schoolchildren died in a dormitory fire in central China’s Henan province, the official Xinhua news agency reported Saturday.
The blaze at the Yingcai School in Henan’s Yanshanpu village was reported to the local fire department at 11:00 pm (1500 GMT) Friday night, Xinhua said.
Thirteen students were confirmed dead and one injured. A teacher at the school told state-run Hebei Daily that all the victims were from the same third-grade class of nine and 10-year-olds.
On Saturday evening AFP journalists saw the area around the school cordoned off, with more than a dozen police officers patrolling the scene.
The owner of a supermarket told AFP she was asleep when the blaze took hold, but had heard about the tragedy. “The kids at the school are definitely mostly living around this area,” she said of the nearby boarding school.
“Our kids don’t go there so we’re not sure about the details,” she added. Other shopkeepers in the area said they too had gone to bed by the time the deadly fire hit the dormitory. AFP reporters were blocked from the immediate scene of the inferno, but China National Radio said that some windows of the dormitory building had been smashed.
Yanshanpu village was quiet and foggy on Saturday night, AFP journalists saw, with just a handful of shops, some unlit buildings and hardly anybody walking on the streets. There was a heavy security presence, with police cars lining a long stretch of the main street and a handful of onlookers standing behind the cordon tape. One woman told AFP that some of the pupils’ parents had left their children in the boarding school while they worked outside the area. Xinhua reported the flames had been extinguished by 11:40 pm on Friday night.
The injured survivor “is currently receiving treatment at the hospital and is in stable condition”, according to the country’s official news agency.