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13 children die in fire
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THIRTEEN children aged between three and four were killed yesterday when a fire engulfed a kindergarten in Southeast China's Jiangxi Province where more than 40 children died in a school explosion in March.
The fire broke out shortly after midnight in a dormitory at a kindergarten in Nanchang, the provincial capital.
The children — seven boys and six girls — were thought to have suffocated.
Four children managed to escape the blaze. One ran to safety by himself while three others were pulled clear by rescuers.
The blaze apparently started when a burning coil of mosquito repellent set fire to bedding in the kindergarten, which was attached to Jiangxi Radio and Television Station, police said. Such coils, whose smoke drives away insects, are widely used throughout China.
Local residents in nearby apartment blocks raised the alarm after seeing smoke billowing from the building.
Witnesses said grief-stricken parents gathered outside the kindergarten in the early hours of the morning as the firefighters doused the flames.
“They were very upset, there was a lot of crying and screaming,” the man told reporters. He said the parents were later taken to a nearby hotel.
He said the kindergarten was an elite establishment for well-off families which charged monthly fees of up to 1,700 yuan (US$204), and that the dead children were not from families employed by the station.
Some Chinese kindergartens provide boarding services for children from families in which both parents work. The youngsters usually stay in the kindergartens on weekdays and return to families at weekends.
The province's new governor Huang Zhiquan arrived at the scene to supervise the rescue operation. Investigations were under way to find those responsible for the fire.
Huang was only appointed last month after his predecessor Shu Shengyou was removed from his post in the aftermath of the March 6 deadly explosion that killed 42 people, most of them young students, at a school in the village of Fanglin, a three-hour drive from Nanchang. (SD-Agencies)
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