Five girls were trampled to death and at least 32 pupils were injured in a stampede at a school in Delhi, which was apparently caused by torrential late monsoon rains.

The stampede began as students aged between 8 and 16 prepared to sit an examination at a government-run secondary school in the Khajuri Khas area in the northeast of the Indian capital, police said.

Many of the pupils were told to move from the ground floor, which was being flooded, up to the first floor via a narrow staircase, according to witnesses and officials.

Panic broke out when they ran into other students coming down the stairs, and rumours spread that they could be electrocuted because the building was waterlogged and the wiring faulty, they said.

“Some of the children on the first floor were asked to come down and others were asked to go up and apparently the staircase was very narrow,” said Dharmendra Kumar, the joint police commissioner.

The five dead girls were aged between 12 and 17, hospital staff said. Six remained in critical condition with head and spinal injuries.

Sheila Dikshit, Delhi’s chief minister, said that the Government had ordered an investigation. “This is such a tragedy for which I cannot give an explanation,” she told reporters.

One girl who survived suggested that the stampede was caused by a group of boys barging into one of the girls’ classrooms. “The exams were about to start when suddenly some boys came inside,” Sanjana Gautam told the Press Trust of India news agency. “They pushed us and then we came out. We were coming down the staircase when the stampede took place.”

While parents waited at the hospital to take home the bodies of their children, others gathered outside the school and started throwing rocks. Residents also hurled stones at a bus and fire engine, injuring one person, before police reinforcements arrived.

The accident happened after a night of torrential rain that blocked roads, causing many children to be late for school.

Stampede deaths are regular in India, though it is rare for a school to be involved.

In September last year at least 168 devotees were trampled to death in a stampede at a temple in the city of Jodhpur in northern India.

A month earlier at least 145 people, including 40 children, were killed in a stampede at the Naina Devi temple in the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh.

Weeks before that, six people died at a Hindu festival attended by about a million people in the town of Puri in the eastern state of Orissa.

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