PETION-VILLE (Haiti) - A SCHOOL with 700 students in a Haitian shanty-town collapsed here on Friday leaving a dozen people dead, and with many still buried in the debris, rescuers warned that the toll could grow 'very high'.

The three-story La Promesse (The Promise) school in Petion-ville, in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, collapsed while classes were in session at about 10.00 am (1100pm Singapore time) on Friday.

A fourth story was under construction atop the school, attended by students from ages three to 20 and overseen by a priest, when it collapsed.

'The teachers are hurt, the children are seriously injured. And there are some dead. I saw three bodies,' another policeman told AFP, without giving further details.

As worried parents rushed to the site in search of their children, dozens of injured students were sent by ambulances to nearby hospitals in the hours after the building caved in.

Aid workers feared the death toll would rise.

'We don't have a number of the victims at the moment, but it could be very high,' International Red Cross official Alex Claudon told CNN.

'The International Red Cross, the Haitian Red Cross, the authorities, the United Nations force is here, working together to establish a triage area and then to refer all the victims that we can possibly save to hospital,' Mr Claudon said.

Scores of people climbed over the pile of crumbled concrete-and-steel bar to rescue those pinned underneath, their faces covered in the grey dust of the cement.

Cries of distress could be heard around the site, from still-alive students and teachers beneath the rubble and from parents desperately searching for their children.

The bodies of the first victims, some with their limbs crushed, were laid inside a building next to the school and covered with sheets.

A deeply distressed Marie Flore, mother of three children, said she had no news of any of them.

'It brought down the rest of the building while the students were in class,' said another panic-stricken woman who had hurried to the scene to look for her child.

The school collapse also damaged or destroyed at least five homes next to it.

Haitian President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis hurried to the scene to oversee rescue efforts, as other officials swore an investigation into the construction and a survey of other schools possibly at risk.

'This construction did not meet normal standards. We are going to ask the minister of education to make an inspection of all the schools built in the same way,' Senator Yvon Bissereth told AFP.

'What we need right now is heavy search and rescue equipment to come here.'

The most seriously injured people were being ferried to the closest hospitals in ambulances provided by the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the UN mission in Haiti. -- AFP

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