By Salisu Maradun,

Gusau—Two students of Government Unity Secondary School, Gumi, Zamfara State, were reported killed by food poisoning with nine others in critical condition at the Federal Medical Centre, Gusau, the state capital, following which government ordered the closure of the school indefinitely.

A source said: “The food supplied to the students since resumption are expired ones, while some stored grains, such as beans, guinea corn and other perishables were of old stock, and could be the cause of the outbreak.”

However, some of the students told Vanguard that they had been complaining about the quality of food they were being fed with by the school authorities.

One of them, who is from Niger State, said he had long stopped eating the school’s food when he discovered that they were unhealthy, “so I decided to tell my parents to supply me with food from home.”

The state Information and Culture Commissioner, Alhaji Umar Bukkuyum, said what they have on hand in the school was an outbreak, the cause of which is yet to be known.

He said: “Nobody can exactly say what the real cause of this calamity was. We can only talk on an issue that we know, so we will not make mistakes.”

Though he denied the casualty number, the commissioner said only five of them were in the hospital and not nine.

Bukkuyum said the state government had already constituted a committee which was shouldered with the responsibility of finding out the actual cause of the disease and the subsequent death of the two students.