"It being the holy month of Ramzan, my daughter was fasting. She did not even have food in the morning before going to school".
These were the words of a distraught Shamshari, mother of Afroz, who was among the five girl students who died in a stampede in a government school in north-east Delhi.
Crying inconsolably, she said, "Authorities told me that she is dead."
A large number of parents and relatives of the injured gathered at the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital but were not allowed inside by police deployed there to control the agitated crowd.
The relatives rued they were being kept in the dark about the condition of their wards.
"I don't know the condition of my daughter. Somebody told me that she has broken her right leg. But there is no word from the authorities," said the mother of 14-year-old Mumtaz.
Sanjana Gautam, a Class XI student, said the stampede took place after some boys came inside their classroom when their exams were about to start.
"The exams were about to start when suddenly some boys came inside. They pushed us and then we came out. We were coming down the staircase when the stampede took place," she claimed.
Her father Vir Singh Gautam claimed that a teacher told him that there was a change in venue of examinations and students started rushing to another classroom. "This resulted in the stampede on the staircase," he said.
