September 25, 2002	Wednesday	Rajab 17, 1423

BEIJING, Sept 24: Twenty-one school pupils died and 52 more were injured in north China’s Inner Mongolia region when a guardrail collapsed causing a crush in a dark stairwell, officials and reports said.

The dead, including 14 girls, were aged between 12 and 15, officials said.

The accident happened at the No. 2 Middle School in Fengzhen City on Monday evening when the guardrail of the staircase suddenly gave way, a city official told AFP.

The pupils were rushing out of the school from classrooms situated on the top floor of a three-storey building when the iron rail collapsed, he said, giving his name as Tian.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, more than 1,500 pupils were rushing down pitch-black stairwells in two separate school buildings at the time, following the end of after-school homework classes.

“About four or five stairs from the bottom of one stairwell, the guardrail collapsed and the students at the front were pushed to the ground,” the agency said.

“The students at the back could not see and carried on pushing, provoking the accident.”

Tian said most of those who died had been unable to breathe.

“From what I was told, the guardrail collapsed and many pupils died of suffocation,” he said.—AFP