AFP/Patna
Grieving parents attacked a headteacher’s house in eastern India to protest the deaths of 23 pupils who ate a poisoned school lunch and the response by officials to the tragedy, police and witnesses said yesterday.
Parents also angrily protested outside the community hall in the village in Bihar, where the children died after being served a meal, apparently laced with insecticide, on Tuesday, a senior policeman said.
“There was ransacking of the principal’s house,” superintendent Sujit Kumar said.
“There were sporadic incidents of violence,” added Kumar.
The deputy development commissioner of Saran district, which oversees the school meal programme, said that local officers had also briefed him on the unrest.
“Our teams on the ground reported that angry parents did try to damage the house of the headmistress,” Raman Kumar said.
Surendra Rai, who was one of the parents who took part in the attack on headmistress Meena Kumari’s home, said there was widespread anger both towards the teacher and the police. “Why have the police not been able to arrest the headmistress who forced our children to eat poisonous food? She should be killed,” said Rai, whose daughter was among those who died in the tragedy.
An AFP reporter on the scene said he saw windows of the home smashed, while anguished parents also protested outside the government community centre in the village.
Many of the victims, aged four to 12, from Gandaman village, were buried on a playing field adjacent to the primary school.
Some 24 children and a cook remain sick in a hospital in the state capital Patna, an official said. Authorities said they are probing whether the food or the cooking oil was accidentally or deliberately poisoned.
Officials said on Thursday it appeared from post mortem results that the food was contaminated with a pesticide.
Police officer Kumar said they had earlier raided the home of Kumari, who fled with her husband and brother-in-law when they saw children falling ill in the school. “We found bags of fertilisers and pesticides kept next to bags of potato and rice in the headmistress’s house,” Kumar said. “She was an educated woman, so why was she storing poison and food together?” Parents said the headmistress had invited every child from the village to attend school on Tuesday as she wanted to distribute free books and uniforms. “I sent my daughter hoping she would get all the books for the year but she never came home,” said Ajay Kumar, a farmer whose five-year-old daughter was among the victims.
