Seven die in blast at China kindergarten

Street-food seller’s gas cylinder exploded at school gates, witnesses claim, as 60 people injured in Jiangsu province

BEIJING // Seven people were killed and more than 60 injured in an explosion at a kindergarten in China yesterday. The explosion happened at 4.50pm near the school’s gates, said officials in Xuzhou city, in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu.

A police official said the cause of the blast was under investiga- tion. However, the Global Times and China Youth Daily newspapers cited witnesses as saying that a gas cylinder at a food stall had exploded.

A witness told Global Times the blast sent people flying several metres into the air

Two people died at the site of the explosion and five while being treated, although the num- ber of children among them was unknown. Nine of the 66 people injured were said to be in a serious condition, the Xuzhou city government said.

Pictures of the scene showed more than a dozen people outside a building, many lying on the ground and some appearing to be unconscious, including a small child.

The force of the blast tore people’s clothes off, images circulating online showed, and one woman was seen clutching a weeping child.

A video posted by the People’s Daily showed emergency work- ers arriving at the scene with wheeled stretchers.

After the blast, the danger posed by gas canisters at food stalls became a topic among users of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

“China’s small restaurants are landmines, and every mobile street vendor is a moving bomb,” one person wrote.

“How can the city management officers allow a vendor to set up a stall at a school entrance with a gas fuel canister?”

The explosion was the latest tragedy to happen at a kindergarten in China in recent weeks.

A bus packed with kindergarten pupils burst into flames in a tunnel in eastern Shandong province on May 9, killing 11 children, a teacher and the driver.

Officials later said the fire was started by the driver, who was angry at losing overtime wages.

There have also been knife attacks at schools in recent years.

In January, a man armed with a knife wounded 11 children in a stabbing spree at a kindergarten in the southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. In February last year, a knife-wielding assailant wounded 10 children in a playground in Haikou, on the southern island province of Hainan, before committing suicide.

In 2014, state media reported that a man stabbed three children and a teacher to death and wounded several others in a rampage at a primary school that had refused to enrol his daughter. That followed a March 2013 incident in which a man killed two relatives and then slashed 11 people, including six children, outside a school in China’s commercial hub Shanghai.