7 officials punished for school stampede

Five officials were suspended and two were removed from their posts after a stampede in a primary school in Kunming, Yunnan Province on Friday afternoon, which has left six dead and another 26 injured, two severely, the local government announced in a statement Saturday.

Five officials including Wang Jian, a deputy director of the Kunming Education Bureau, Lu Jia, a deputy head of the Panlong district government and Li Lan, the principal of the Mingtong Elementary School, were suspended from their jobs and put under investigation, according to the statement.

Li Zhang, a deputy director of the district education bureau who is in charge of school security, and Yang Lin, a vice principal of the school, were removed from their posts.

Twelve of the 26 injured students have been released from hospital. Of the two severely injured students one remains in a critical condition.

According to the statement, the incident occurred at 2:30pm on Friday in a narrow corridor. As nearly 600 students were returning to their classrooms after their noon break, two 2-meter-long and 30-centimeter-thick mats that were leaning on a wall fell, trapping some students underneath. The mats were placed there by physical education teachers, the statement said.

"I saw five boys in Grade one playing on a mat," Nandu Daily quoted a witness named Wang Jia as saying.

"Suddenly they were knocked down by another mat and some students in Grade two ran onto the mat and were playing on it. The students underneath began shouting and crying," said another witness named Wang Hai. This led to a panicked stampede in the corridor as students rushed to their classes, which crushed the students.

This is not the first such incident. Nine school students were injured in a stampede on an escalator in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in 2013, according to the Yangcheng Evening News.