KUMBAKONAM, July 17: Police arrested five people for negligence on Saturday after 89 young students were killed in a fire that engulfed a school in southern India, while anguished parents held funerals for their dead children.

The children, aged between six and 10 years, were killed when the thatched-roofed Saraswati Primary School in Kumbakonam - 350 kilometres from Madras, capital of Tamil Nadu - went up in flames on Friday.

Rescuers told horror stories of the fight to save the children who struggled to flee the fast-spreading flames, only to be blocked by a locked grill door.-AFP