Police hunt principal over poison in lunches

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.

Twenty-three children between the ages of 5 and 12 have now died from eating food laced with insecticide and many others had fallen ill.

Authorities discovered a container of pesticide in the school’s cooking area next to the vegetable cooking oil and mustard oil, according to Amarjeet Sinha, a top official in the state of Bihar, where the tragedy took place.

“It’s not a case of food poisoning. It’s a case of poison in food in a large quantity, going by the instant deaths,” he said.

Earlier, some officials had said it appeared that the rice had somehow been tainted with pesticide and might not have been properly washed before it was cooked.

More answers were expected today, when a forensic laboratory was to issue the results of its tests on the dead children, the food and the uncooked grain stored by the principal in her house, he said. Police were searching for the principal, who fled after the students started falling sick, Sinha said.

The cooks, Manju Devi and Pano Devi, said that the principal controlled the food for the free daily lunch provided by the government at the school. On Tuesday morning she gave them rice, potatoes, soy and other ingredients needed to prepare the meal and then went about her business. As the children ate, they started fainting, the cooks said.

The two cooks were not spared either.

Manju Devi, 30, ate some of the food and fainted. Her three children, ages 5, 8 and 13, fell ill as well. All are now in stable condition.

While Pano Devi, 35, didn’t eat the tainted food, her three children did. Two of them died and the third, a 4-year-old daughter, was in the hospital.

“I will stop cooking at the school,” she said. “I am so horrified that I wouldn’t grieve more if my only surviving child died.”

Sinha said one of the cooks told authorities that the cooking oil appeared different than usual, but the principal told her to use it anyway. Doctors believed the food contained an organophosphate used as an insecticide, he said.

The free midday meal was served to the children in Gandamal village in Masrakh block, 80km north of Patna, the Bihar state capital.

Those who survived were unlikely to suffer from any serious after-effects, said Patna Medical College hospital superintendent Amarkant Jha Amar.

Amar said postmortem reports on the children who died confirmed that insecticide was either in the food or cooking oil.