PETIONVILLE (Haiti) - RESCUERS have pulled four children alive from the rubble of a three-storey Haitian school that collapsed on classrooms filled with students and teachers, even as the death toll rises to above 90.

Emergency workers cradled the dazed children in their arms and rushed them to ambulances, United Nations police spokesman Andre Leclerc said yesterday.

The extent of the injuries to the two girls, ages three and five, and two boys, a seven-year-old and a teenager, was not known, Mr Leclerc said. But he added the three-year-old had a cut on her head and seemed to be fine.

Haitian police, meanwhile, have arrested the owner of the school. Mr Fortin Augustin, the preacher who built and owns the College La Promesse in suburban Port-au-Prince, was arrested late on Saturday and charged with involuntary manslaughter, said police spokesman Garry Desrosier.

Augustin was being held at a police station in Haiti's capital, while a United States rescue crew searched overnight for survivors of last Friday's collapse of the school building, which normally holds 500 students and teachers.

Civil protection service head Alta Jean-Baptiste said there were 84 people confirmed dead and 150 injured as of noon last Saturday.

Another civil protection official, Mr Michel Joseph, said he had seen eight more bodies, bringing the count to 92.

In the two days, parents at the scene clutched pictures of their children as they watched rescue workers sidestep human limbs sticking out from the rubble. Riot police chased away several Haitians who found their way past police barriers and tried to excavate the site themselves.

The hillside school had been holding a party the day of the collapse, exempting students from wearing uniforms and complicating efforts to identify their bodies.

Thousands of Haitians cheered and shouted directions as trucks carried oxygen and medical supplies down the mountain road last Saturday.

By nightfall, hundreds stood in the shadows across a ravine behind the collapsed school watching rescuers pick through the rubble amid floodlights.

President Rene Preval, who has visited the concrete school three times since its collapse, said poor construction and a lack of steel reinforcements were to blame and warned that structures throughout Haiti run a similar risk.

Haiti, the poorest and most politically tumultuous country in the Western Hemisphere, has struggled this year to recover from riots over rising food prices and the destruction brought by a string of hurricanes and tropical storms that killed nearly 800 people. -- AP, REUTERS