BEIJING, May 12: Students fought to escape from rubble and frantic rescuers dug out others buried in a school that collapsed following the earthquake in China on Monday. At least 50 people were confirmed dead and hundreds of others were buried alive in the collapse at the Juyuan Middle School in Sichuan province.

Pictures posted on Chinese internet news sites showed rescuers standing atop huge slabs of shattered concrete at the school as cranes tried to lift away massive chunks of rubble.

Altogether, 900 children were believed to be inside the school when the quake struck.

Xinhua reporters on the scene said the three-storey school building had partially collapsed. Some buried teenagers were struggling to break loose from underneath the ruins, while others were pinned under rubble and crying out for help.

Grieving parents watched as five cranes were excavating at the site as an ambulance waited.

One tearful mother told Xinhua that her son, Zhang Chengwei, was buried in the ruins.

Two girls said they escaped because they had “run faster than others”. The quake struck in mid-afternoon, when Chinese schoolchildren were still in classes. “It was around 2.30pm, and the building suddenly began to rock back and forth,” one of them recalled.

A villager said the school had 18 classes, with about 50 students in each class. “We ran out of the house when the quake hit,” said Gao Shangyuan, a villager who lived close to the school and helped with the rescue work.

Gao and other villagers helped pull dozens of students out of the ruins.

“Some had jumped out of the window and a few others ran down the stairs that did not collapse,” he said.—AFP