5 Chinese students die in wall collapse at middle school

USPA News - Five students were killed Monday when a wall collapsed onto a group of teenage girls at an outdoor basketball game at a junior high school in eastern China, local authorities said. Two other students were wounded but did not suffer life-threatening injuries.

The wall at the privately-run Tongren Middle School in Huaibei City, located in Anhui province, collapsed at about 2:30 p.m. local time as students from two classes were participating in a basketball tournament. Rescue workers were forced to use their bare hands to remove debris in order to reach the victims. A spokesman for the provincial branch of the State Administration of Work Safety said that five students, all of them teenage girls, were found dead while two others were injured. "The rescue work has been completed," the spokesperson said, adding that the two injured did not suffer life-threatening injuries. The cause of Monday`s collapse was not immediately known, but shoddy construction at Chinese schools has previously resulted in casualties. More than 7,000 inadequately engineered schoolrooms collapsed when a major 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck Sichuan province in May 2008, with scores of schoolchildren among the more than 80,000 dead.