Teachers accused of fleeing devastating blaze as children perished

Teachers at a school in India where a fire killed at least 84 children have been accused of fleeing the blazing building without helping the children escape.

The accusations were made as distraught parents cremated the bodies of their children after the devastating fire that swept through the private Lord Krishna Middle School in, Thanjavur district, 1,300 miles south of New Delhi, India’s capital.

Police later said they had arrested the school principal, Pulavar Palanichamy and three kitchen workers who were preparing lunch, and intended to charge them with negligence. Four education department officials were suspended.

“This is entirely due to criminal negligence on the part of the school management and the district school authorities,” said J Jayalalithaa, head of government in Tamil Nadu state.

The fire started in a kitchen and jumped across the flammable roofs of the three-storey school, said J Radhakrishnan, the school administrator.

“As far as we can make out, the fire started in the kitchen of the school on the ground floor,” Radhakrishnan told The Associated Press. “The sparks flying up would have set fire to the thatched roof on the first floor.”

No teachers died and a senior fire officer said it was because they abandoned the children and fled. But the district government administrator said it was too early to know and he stressed that 700 children got out alive and were probably helped by teachers.

He said that when the fire began at 11am local time yesterday, the building was packed with 800 pupils – most aged six to 13 – in rooms shared by up to six classes at a time.

Doctors applied ointment on the scalded bodies of the injured, and nurses covered them with large banana leaves, believed to soothe the burning skin.

Parents, many crying, waved hand-held bamboo and plastic fans – despite air conditioning – to soothe the inflamed wounds. Hundreds more waited outside the hospital.

By evening, 45 bodies had been cremated in mass ceremonies, Radhakrishnan said. Several bodies were taken for cremations in nearby villages, where many children came from. The official lowered the number of injured – earlier put at more than 100 – to 22.

The school’s long, narrow, windowless classrooms each had only one exit. A reporter for New Delhi Television News described marks on the walls that she said showed the children had tried to tear through the bricks and concrete.

Hundreds of small wooden stools lay toppled on the blackened floor, strewn with rubber slippers, shoes, schoolbags, notebooks, lunch boxes and clothes. Blackboards still bore traces of the lessons the children were learning.

Nearby residents had started dousing the flames and trying to rescue the children before firefighters arrived, a senior fire department official said. But the crowd of uncontrolled, volunteer rescuers ended up blocking the main door as they tried to help.

MB Venkatesh, who lives near the school, said the teachers fled after opening the locked front door.

Most Indian primary schools lock the main gate or door during school hours to keep young children from getting out unescorted into the street.

However, Radhakrishnan, the district’s highest government official, said it might be premature to blame the teachers.

“As of now, it might be far-fetched to say that teachers escaped without protecting the children,” he said in a telephone interview. “After all, they escaped along with 700-odd children. That means they protected many children.”