China says no one to blame for schools collapse

China says no one to blame for schools collapse

China has said a government investigation has found no evidence that human negligence caused schools to collapse during last year's earthquake. Thousands of schools were damaged while other buildings nearby remained intact in the massive quake in Sichuan Province. Many parents of dead and injured pupils said they had been badly built by the government wanting to cut costs and demanded an inquiry. Now, days before the 12 May anniversary of the disaster that killed 90,000 people, the government has rejected the accusation that anyone was responsible for the schools' collapse.

A total of 5,335 schoolchildren died when their classrooms collapsed according to official figures released yesterday. In some cases, schools were the only buildings to fall down during the magnitude-8 earthquake. But some parents believe the government has never really been serious about investigating why more than 14,000 schools were damaged in the quake.

Beijing officials investigated the accusations, and initially suggested they could be true. But Tang Kai, a senior planning official, said, according to the BBC, that there was no evidence that human negligence led to the collapse of any school – or any other building. "Up to now, we haven't found that anybody caused or did anything to make the buildings vulnerable so that they collapsed," he said. He admitted the investigation into collapsed schools had not been easy. "In order to rescue people who were buried beneath, some of the buildings were pulled down, so we couldn't analyse how the earthquake had affected the structure of that building," he told a news conference about the earthquake reconstruction efforts. He said investigators had had to rely on the original design plans to work out if the building had not been built properly. He added that local governments were still looking into the question of responsibility.

But yesterday, the head of the Sichuan Provincial Justice Department, Liu Zuoming, said in an interview with Chinese media that flawed building-quality standards were behind the collapse of the schools. Both parents and activists claim the official death toll of 5,335 is far lower than the estimate of 9000 dead compiled by local media soon after the earthquake, and have criticised the time it took the authorities to release the figure. Last August parents said they unsuccessfully tried to stop the authorities removing rubble from the collapsed Juyuan Middle School in the city of Dujiangyan. "It's the government's effort to try to cover up the problem," said Zhou Siqiang, whose daughter died at the Juyuan school.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children