Soon after they served the daily free lunch they had prepared for dozens of children at a rural Indian school, the two cooks realised something was very wrong. The students started fainting. Within hours, they began dying.

Post-mortem tests on 22 children who died after eating a school lunch in India have confirmed that insecticide was in the food or cooking oil, doctors said.

At least 22 children have died and more than two dozen others are sick after eating a free school