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Updated Tuesday, June 3, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By CARA ANNA, AP



	Dozens of parents who lost children to the May 12 quake kneel outside the court house in Dujiangyan, China Tuesday, June 3, 2008. Parents with pictures of their children who died when a school collapsed, demand for justice and government response to questions of shoddy construction resulting in the school collapsing and high number of deaths. (AP) Enlarge Photo

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Chinese police pull parents away from protest over bad school construction

Tuesday's protest happened while Chinese leader Li Changchun, the country's fifth-ranked ruler, was touring other parts of the city. The official Xinhua News Agency said Li was checking heritage sites damaged in the earthquake.

An official from the foreign affairs office of the local government, Zao Ming, said "this is not a good place to do interviews. ... In a disaster like this, there will be a lot of opinions. The government will solve their problems."

There were several Japanese reporters at the courthouse. One witness who did not want to be identified said the police told the parents "the Japanese are reporting bad things about you."

An Associated Press reporter and two photographers covering the protest were forcibly dragged up the steps into the courthouse by police trying to prevent them from seeing the demonstration.

The confirmed death toll for China's worst disaster in three decades was 69,019, and more than 18,000 people are still missing, the government said. The quake also left 5 million people homeless.

Meanwhile, Xinhua said authorities have delayed for two days a bid to divert water from a huge lake formed when the quake sent landslides tumbling into a river in Beichuan in northern Sichuan.

Water levels in the lake had been rising steadily and threatened to flood surrounding areas, prompting authorities to evacuate nearly 200,000 people already uprooted by the quake.

But Xinhua said with little rain forecast for the next several days, rescue workers were not likely to start draining off the water until Thursday. The work had been expected to start Tuesday.

Workers have already used heavy earth-moving equipment to dig a runoff channel to remove the water. The government is worried the newly formed lake could burst, sending a wall of water through a valley.

In an indication of how difficult rescue conditions are in parts of Sichuan, there is still no sign of a helicopter that crashed nearly three days ago while ferrying survivors. Thousands of soldiers have been combing remote mountains in search of the military helicopter.

The Russian-designed Mi-171 transport was carrying 19 people, 14 of them people injured in the quake, when it flew into fog and turbulence and crashed Saturday near the epicenter of the quake in the town of Wenchuan, state media reported.

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