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Madman blasted school: premier
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PREMIER Zhu Rongji yesterday said a lone madman may have been responsible for the deadly explosion in a primary school in East China's Jiangxi Province that killed 41 people, most of them young students.
Zhu told Hong Kong reporters during a meeting in Beijing that initial investigations showed Tuesday's blast in the village of Fanglin was caused by a “man who has a grudge and mental illness".
Zhu denied earlier reports that pupils in the school in Wanzai County were making firecrackers in the two-storey school at the time of the blast to cover the school's budget.
The premier's comments followed a report in the Liaoshen Evening News yesterday, which also blamed a mysterious man in black.
The paper quoted a teacher surnamed Deng, who survived the deadly blast, as saying a man in black brought firework powder into his school room on the ground floor and set it alight.
“At the time we were about 20 minutes into the second class, when I saw outside the classroom a 35 or 36-year-old man carrying a sack. I immediately left the lecture podium and told him not to enter the classroom," he recalled.
He said the man entered the classroom and put the sack in a corner of the classroom wall.
“Then he suddenly took out a lighter and lit a fuse. I yelled at the students to get out quickly then there was a loud explosion and from then I don't remember anything," he said.
Experts from Ministry of Public Security arrived at the scene of explosion on Wednesday night for investigation and have not confirmed the cause of the blast.(SD-Agencies)
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