Chinese chatrooms cleared of school blast critics

Many schoolchildren were injured in Tuesday's blast

In this story: "Why won't you post my message?" Pupils forced to make firecrackers RELATED STORIES, SITES

BEIJING, China -- Comments ridiculing Beijing's official explanation of a fatal schoolhouse blast have disappeared from Chinese Internet websites.

Premier Zhu Rongji and the official Xinhua news agency have said a deranged suicide bomber set off the explosion that killed some 40 children in the remote eastern village.

Internet chat rooms have posted comments echoing villagers living around the Jiangxi province elementary school in deriding the suicide bomber explanation.

Tuesday's blast flattened four classrooms and killed at least 42 people. Local officials say the toll was 39 children and four adults.

Internet chatrooms -- the most freewheeling forum in a Communist country which controls all print and broadcast media -- buzzed angry words at villagers' accounts that Fanglin elementary school doubled as a fireworks factory.

"Why won't you post my message?"

But on Saturday, the chat room of the popular portal Sina.com was cleared of messages directly challenging the state's view, although some cryptic criticism remained among messages lamenting the deaths of so many children.

Beijing has a tight control over all print and broadcast media

"If we take the false as true, the truth becomes false," wrote one subscriber.

"Why won't you post my message?" asked another.

Sina.com operators posted a reminder that it reserved the right to withhold or delete offensive messages and that the authors bore legal responsibility for their messages.

Officials in Wanzai country, who declined to give their names, refused to comment on Saturday on the huge gulf between the official explanation of the blast and local accounts that students were forced to spend time making fireworks in their school.

State-run Xinhua news agency said a 33-year-old man man named Li Chuicai and nicknamed "Psycho" broke into a third-grade classroom carrying two bags stuffed with firecrackers which he detonated, killing himself and bringing the school crashing down.

Pupils forced to make firecrackers

Premier Zhu Rongji, speaking to Hong Kong reporters during an annual parliamentary session in Beijing on Thursday, flatly denied explosives were housed in the school.

But schoolgirl Gao Yun, 13, told Reuters on Friday she and other pupils had been forced to make firecrackers in the school for the past four years and that children who did not work hard enough were punished.

Officials in Wanzai county say the practice is common in the poor, mountainous area, famous for its fireworks. They blame a cutback on central government support for education, which forces schools to fund themselves.

The Wanzai officials said bodies from the classroom explosion had already been disposed of and the surviving students would return to class on Monday.

"The dead bodies have all been dealt with, either cremated or buried," said an official in Wanzai.

Families of those killed would get 30,000 yuan ($3,625) for each dead child and another 3,000 yuan from an insurance company, he said.

"Pupils in Fanglin elementary school, about 300, will go back to school on Monday, joining classes in seven nearby elementary schools," the oficial told Reuters.

"The new Fanglin school will be built at another place to avoid negative psychological influence on the pupils," a second official said.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Xinhua News Agency

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