Officials punished in death of 5 street children (3)

Distracted by poverty and laborious farm work, he and his wife paid little attention to their son, let alone his brothers' sons.

The other four boys were supposed to be under the care of an aging, blind grandmother who had difficulties even caring for herself, so most of the time, the kids just survived by themselves, officials said.

"We need to put the well-being of left-behind children at the top of our agenda," Bijie Vice-Mayor Hu Jihong said.

Li Fangping, a lawyer in Beijing, and Feng Ding, Li's counterpart in Jiangsu province, sent two applications to Bijie's education and public security bureaus on Tuesday, asking the two bureaus to make public their handling of the boys' deaths.

Li said he hopes the public security bureau can disclose whether there is a communication mechanism between the police and education authority to respond to students who desert school, and whether police fulfilled their responsibility of searching for the boys after their guardians reported them missing on Nov 5.

Feng wants the education bureau to specify what measures it took to ensure left-behind children receive schooling and to make sure dropouts will return to school.

"Officials from the education and civil affairs bureaus who were found responsible have been punished, but we have noticed that the public security department was, without any doubt, also responsible for the boys' tragedies," Li said.

"The police failed to act in a timely and effective manner in this case, which is terrible and will make the public feel insecure."

Local civil affairs authorities have provided aid to more than 750 street children since February 2011, and six out of the eight counties and districts have established aid stations, said Tao Jin, an official from Bijie's civil affairs bureau.

Police officers and urban management personnel patrol main streets, tunnels, bridges and underground passes every day from 8:30 am to 9 pm to see if there are people in need of help, he said, without explaining why the officers failed to notice the five children.

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