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Airstrike kills 12 in Syria high school, says NGO

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says most killed were children under 18

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Free Syrian Army fighters walk with their weapons inside a damaged building beside the Syrian Regime Air Intelligence centre in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that an air strike on a high school in Raqa killed 12 people. Photo: Reuters

An airstrike on a high school in a rebel-held city of northern Syria killed 12 people, most of them pupils, on Sunday, a monitoring group said.

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“The Syrian air force bombed a technical high school in the city of Raqa, killing 12 people, most of them children under 18, and wounding many other people, some of them seriously,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Britain-based group posted video footage showing mangled bodies, one of them lying under schoolbooks. Its authenticity could not immediately be verified.

“There was panic with children crying as they sought to take shelter,” the observatory quoted a survivor as saying.

Raqa, on the Euphrates valley 160 kilometres east of the main northern city of Aleppo, is the only provincial capital entirely in rebel hands.

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Captured from government forces on March 6, the city is now largely controlled by al-Qaeda loyalists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

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