The dead, including 14 girls, were aged between 12 and 15, officials said.

The accident happened at the No. 2 Middle School in Fengzhen City on Monday evening when the guardrail of the staircase suddenly gave way, a city official told Nampa-AFP.

The pupils were rushing out of the school from classrooms situated on the top floor of a three-storey building when the iron rail collapsed, he said, giving his name as Tian.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, more than 1,500 pupils were rushing down pitch-black stairwells in two separate school buildings at the time, following the end of after-school homework classes.

"About four or five stairs from the bottom of one stairwell, the guardrail collapsed and the students at the front were pushed to the ground," the agency said.

"The students at the back could not see and carried on pushing, provoking the accident."

Tian said most of those who died had been unable to breathe.

"From what I was told, the guardrail collapsed and many pupils died of suffocation," he said.

According to an official at the Fengzhen city government hospitals bureau, 14 girls were among the dead. Among 52 taken to hospital, six were seriously hurt, he said, giving his name as Chen.

According to Xinhua, around 260 medical workers and 12 ambulances were sent to the school to carry out rescue work.

"Special teams have been established to investigate the cause and to deal with the aftermath of the accident," Xinhua said.

The school is located on the top floor of a building, with offices and shops below, Tian said.

Officials at the school itself and at other government agencies in Fengzhen were not immediately available for comment.

Fengzhen is about 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China's far north.

Building standards are often loosely enforced in China, although most fatalities associated with this happen from fires.

On the evening of Christmas Day 2000, 309 mainly young people died in central China when a blaze tore through a fourth floor disco in Luoyang city, Henan province.

Investigators found that a fire escape in the building had been rented to a shopkeeper and was blocked off, reports at the time said.

Safety problems also extend to the country's workplaces, where more than 50,000 people died in the first six months of this year, according to official figures.

boc-pw/mp Nampa-AFP WEB story ENDS (NAMPA 240949)

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