Students pay with their lives for a corrupt building industry

The earthquake hit so suddenly that the hundreds of pupils at Fuxin No2 Primary School in Mianzhu's Fuxin township had no chance. Within seconds, the school's three-storey buildings crumbled, entombing 127 students.

Parents who rushed to the school were confronted with the sight of children's bodies buried under the collapsed slabs.

Later, they noticed that in the debris there were no steel reinforcing bars in the broken columns which had supported the walls. The walls themselves appeared to be made of bricks, and the mortar turned to powder at the touch of a finger.

'Now, looking back, I think I sent my daughter to a school that had a time bomb,' sobbed Xiong Yonghao , whose 11-year-old girl Xiong Xin was killed in the collapse.

For almost a month, Mr Xiong and parents of dozens of other dead pupils have held memorials in the debris amid pictures of their lost children, stuffed animals and school bags covered in dust. They simply want to know one thing: did the quake or the shoddy school buildings kill their children?

Fuxin No2 Primary School was one of a long list of schools in Sichuan whose buildings collapsed during the magnitude 8 quake on May 12, making escape almost impossible for students. More than 300 died in Dujiangyan's Muyu Middle School and about 1,000 dies at Beichuan Middle School when a five-storey building gave way. Sichuan education authorities said the earthquake destroyed more than 7,000 classrooms and killed 4,737 students, but parents insist that more than 10,000 students died.