An 11-year-old child of a private school in Bihar was found dead with a wire around his neck, The Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday. The Class 5 student’s body was discovered on Monday in a teachers’ bathroom of the school, situated in Kaimur district. The police registered a case against the director of the institute, the principal and five teachers.

The door of the toilet, located on the second floor of the building, was shut from the outside when the body was discovered. The child was taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead on arrival.

“Initial investigation points to death by hanging,” the newspaper quoted Superintendent of Police Dilnawaz Ahmad as saying. “He either killed himself or was murdered by other people. It is a heinous crime and police will solve the case within a few days.”

Teachers and the boy’s sister, who is a Class 8 student in the same school, started looking for the child after she was unable to find him. Soon after, the boy’s body was discovered in the bathroom. The child’s mother, a teacher in the school, was on leave that day.

A postmortem analysis of the child’s body was done by a medical board, and a Forensic Science Lab team from Patna would also arrive on Tuesday, police said.

This is reportedly the third such incident to occur in the Kaimur region in a week and the second in the Kudra market area in a month. Angry residents protested outside the school and vandalised the premises after the incident.

Demonstrators also blocked the National Highway-2 at Kudra for several hours, demanding that a murder case be registered against the school administration and its teachers. The blockade was lifted after the police registered a case against school officials.

On August 31, a Class 6 student in Kaimur district’s Sion town, died under suspicious circumstances. School authorities alleged that she had fallen down during morning assembly, but her father said she was completely fit.

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