Four female students jump to their deaths as fire guts dormitory room
Four female students at a Shanghai university jumped to their deaths from their sixth-floor dormitory room after a faulty electrical device started a fire yesterday.
The blaze started just after 6am on the sixth floor of the seven-storey dormitory at the Shanghai Business School. It was extinguished around 6.30am, but the four students jumped from the balcony before firemen reached the scene. The fire was contained in one room, and no other casualties were reported.
Police cordoned off the school and evacuated other students on the sixth floor to another building.
An initial investigation concluded the fire was caused by a malfunctioning water heater, Shanghai police said.
University officials said such electrical appliances were banned in the dormitory, but students often used them anyway.
Witnesses said the blaze was small to begin with, but the students could not get out of their room.
'I saw smoke coming out of the room when I was working in the morning, and two girls were holding the balcony handrail. I shouted to them to get out of the room, but they seemed too scared to move,' a campus cleaner said.
'After a while, the blaze became bigger and burned them. Then they jumped off one by one.'
Another student living on the sixth floor said she had heard someone shout 'run away', and students rushed downstairs.
'The smoke was everywhere in the corridor,' she said.
Witnesses said migrant workers from a nearby construction site shouted at the girls to find water and not to jump, but the girls could not hear them.
University officials said the four were all third-year students of international trade, and ranged in age from 19 to 21.
Two were from Shanghai - one from Minghang district and the other from Chongming Island.
The other two were from Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces.
The parents of the two Shanghai students were meeting university officials to discuss arrangements.
'The parents were sobbing and were too sad to accept the tragedy,' university administrator Chen Min said.
'We've set up four teams to try to comfort and communicate with the four families.
'Although students take fire-safety classes each year, there are no emergency drills, so they are still not capable of rescuing or protecting themselves. This will be a very big lesson for us.'
The university, in Shanghai's central Xuhui district, has more than 10,000 students.
The first floor of the seven-storey dormitory is the school canteen.
The second and third floors are male dorm rooms, while the fourth to sixth are for women and the top floor houses a workshop.
