Doctors spent four weeks removing pieces of paper from the eyes of a 7-year-old girl in China after an extreme bullying incident.
Three boys stopped the young girl on her way to class and forced scraps of paper into her eyes.
Doctors, who plucked-out dozens of paper fragments, said they had never seen a case like it, mainland media reported on Monday.
The incident occurred in Yuzhou, a city in the middle of the central Chinese province of Henan, in September.
The girl said she was accosted by the boys as she returned to class after lunch one day.
"They opened her eyes wide … crumpled a few scraps at a time and squeezed them in," her mother, surnamed Li, said.
The girl complained of poor vision the next day.
Doctors at several hospitals extracted most of the scraps, but none of them were prepared to say if all of the pieces had been removed, according to Henan Televisions's City Channel.
The Yuzhou city government said specialists in Beijing concluded in late October that there were no pieces of paper left in the girl's eyes and that she was safe to go home.
The school principal, a man surnamed Wang, said the boys were just "playing."
"Children at this age, seven or eight, they bore no ill will," he said.
Wang said that no one could recall how many pieces were put into her eyes.
"There was no teacher there at that moment, and no one could tell how many," he said. "According to the one who put them in, it was a corner of a sheet of paper from an exercise book."
Wang and the teacher of the girl's class were ordered to write a self-criticism, a disciplinary action that originated from the Communist Party in the 1940s, said a statement from the Yuzhou government.
The families involved agreed compensation and the boys' guardians were warned to teach the children about safety, the statement said.
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