Five children dead after driver crashes into group crossing road in China
- 19 children injured during lunch break in country’s northeast
- Police detain suspect who fled the scene, Chinese media report
Five children died and 19 were injured – three of them severely – after a car ploughed into a group crossing a road outside a primary school in northeast China on Thursday, Chinese media reported.
Police in the city of Huludao, Liaoning province, said the male driver of an Audi hit the children at around midday outside the No 2 Primary School in Jianchang county, Beijing Youth Daily reported.
According to surveillance camera footage posted online by Global Times, the motorist was driving on the wrong side of the road when the vehicle hit the group of about 30 children, throwing some of them into the air. The video was later taken down.
Some of the casualties were first-grade and kindergarten pupils at the school, while others were yet to be formally identified, Shanghai-based news site Thepaper.cn reported, citing the Jianchang education bureau.
The motorist fled the scene but was later detained. Beijing Time, an online news outlet owned by Beijing Radio and Television Network, quoted local police as identifying the suspect as Han Jihua, the son of the Communist Party boss of Qingniushan village in Jianchang county.
Thepaper.cn quoted an unnamed police officer as saying the suspect was caught shortly before 1pm. No drugs or alcohol were found in his car, but police ordered him to take a drug and alcohol test.