Gaya, July 9: The Sunday prayer schedule shielded the school students of Tergar Monastery — the site of three blasts — from the brunt of bombs.

On weekdays, the kids assemble for routine prayer on the monastery premises at 5.30am, almost coinciding with the timing of the blasts. But as it was a Sunday, the children were scheduled to go to Mahobodhi Mahavihara for the prayers.

“It was sheer luck that the blasts occurred on a Sunday, when the children are taken to the Mahabodhi temple for prayer,” said a teacher of the school. Though the prayers are held in a hall, the teachers could not rule out the possibility of children wandering near the blasts’ sites in case the prayer was conducted at the monastery that day.

Located about one-and-a-half kilometers from the Mahabodhi temple, four explosives were planted at the monastery. Three of them exploded. The fourth was defused.

The Tergar Monastery of Ogyen Trinley Dorjee, one of the two frontrunners for the seat of the 17th Karmapa of the Kagyue sect, runs the residential school. Around 220 students learn Buddhist rituals and documents there. The children wake up around 4.30am and are expected to gather for the prayer at 5.30am. The classes continue from 8am to 12.30pm. A bomb was planted on the window of a classroom, which went off before 6am.

A seven-year-old student of the monastery, Karma Hokta of Nepal, spotted a cylinder bomb wrapped in a black poly bag around 5.30am on Sunday and raised an alarm. “When I went towards the backyard of the double-storeyed building in which classes are conducted on the ground-floor and children live on the first-floor, I saw a black poly bag lying on the ground under a window. I thought of picking it up and put it in a dustbin. Though I did not think it was a bomb, I called the manager, Dhakpa of Tibet, and other children. We had a reverential escape because the cylinder exploded only a few seconds before the manager and we could reach at the place,” Hokta told The Telegraph on Tuesday.

The alarmed manager asked all the children to stay in the courtyard. Within few minutes, two more bombs exploded. One went off under the window of a classroom in the same building, while another one exploded on the playground behind the building, Hokta said.

Dhakpa said at least 50 children were on the first-floor at the time of the explosion. All of them were safely taken out of the building despite windows being damaged in the blasts.

At present, the school has around 220 children from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and the Northeast states of India. They visit Mahabodhi Mahavihara every Sunday for the one-hour prayer around 6am. The rest of the days, they pray in the monastery. At the time of explosions, they were getting ready to leave for the temple. The school has nine teachers, including three from Uttar Pradesh and two each from Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal. One of the teachers, Tsering Gyatso, said despite the blasts the children started for the temple for the prayer.

“When we reached the Kalchakra ground near the temple, we heard the news of blasts inside the temple. The children returned to Tergar Monastery but they had to remain outside it for nearly an hour because security personnel were scanning the premises after the blasts. We have not cleaned the glasses of the windows lying on the ground following an instruction from the investigating agencies. Classes have also been suspended. The children are only participating in the prayers inside the monastery,” Gyatso said.

Two private security personnel usually guard the monastery. “After the blasts, Bihar Military Police jawans have been deputed here by the administration. But we will enhance our internal security,” Dhakpa said.