Four Chinese children were killed and 14 others were missing Thursday after a landslide engulfed their school as they gathered to make up classes lost due to deadly earthquakes last month, state media said.
Chinese state television said four primary school students were confirmed dead after the landslide that buried the school and two farmhouses in mountainous Yunnan province in southwestern China.
Another 14 students remained unaccounted for, the report said. A local villager had also been buried, state media has said.
The students at the Youfang Primary School would not normally have been in school this week as China is on a week-long national holiday.
But officials said the children were making up for lost time caused by disruptions stemming from two September 7 earthquakes that struck Yiliang county where Zhenhe is located, killing 81 people and leaving hundreds injured.
Web users immediately raised questions about the decision to have the children back in the schools.
The safety of school pupils is a sensitive issue after thousands of students died when an 8.0-magnitude tremor in 2008 rocked Sichuan province in southwestern China and parts of neighbouring Shaanxi and Gansu.
“Are the officials all on vacation? Why was there no alert? Why were there students in school during the holidays?” a user of leading portal Sina.com’s popular micro-blogging service asked after the landslide. Many schools collapsed in the 2008 quake, which killed more than 80,000 people in total.
This led to accusations that corner-cutting in construction projects and possibly corruption led to shoddy buildings, especially as many buildings nearby such schools held firm. Images broadcast on state television showed rescue personnel picking through landslide debris. It said the landslide occurred after sustained rains in the area. Many buildings in Yiliang County are located precariously at the foot of steep mountainsides.
