The parents of children killed in last May’s earthquake in China have been routinely detained and harassed when attempting to investigate suspicions of shoddy building standards, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

Many of the parents who lost their only child, crushed to death when more than 7,000 classrooms collapsed in the 7.9 magnitude tremor on May 12, have abandoned hope of redress. Last month a 33-year-old Communist Party official in Beichuan county, which was razed by the earthquake, hanged himself out of grief for the loss of his eight-year-old son.

Other parents have struggled to be heard and to find out whether the schools that crumbled were constructed with sub-standard materials or by authorities that cut costs to skim off funds for their own benefit.

The Amnesty report says that some parents and relatives have been detained for as long as 21 days for trying to seek answers from officials about why their children died. Some have been held repeatedly and the youngest relative was only 8 years old.

Officials have provided a variety of accounts, some saying that schools appeared to have been built with shoddy materials and others saying that the only reason for their collapse was the might of the earthquake. This has failed to satisfy parents who saw other buildings left standing while schoolrooms were flattened.

The report says: “Many of these parents’ lives were devastated when they lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake. It’s completely understandable that they would want to know why their children died and who was responsible. For the Chinese authorities to react by locking up parents, whose only crime was to demand some answers, is beyond belief.”

The report issues an appeal: “The Government of China must stop harassing earthquake survivors, and allow lawyers and civil society to hold those responsible to account.”

China has yet to reveal how many children were among the 69,227 killed and nearly 18,000 missing in the earthquake. It has said that it will publicise a list of the dead and missing by 2010 to show respect to the victims.

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