In China, a kindergarten teacher has been fired after allegedly forcing his young students to smell his feet.

The unnamed teacher shared disturbing images of one child holding his and smelling his foot online.

According to the Beijing Youth Daily, the troubling incident is now being investigated by the police after a screenshot of the teacher’s WeChat post began to spread quickly on Weibo—a Chinese social media site.

The screenshot shows two images and a video of a three-year-old boy holding the man’s socked foot with both hands, smelling the sole of his foot. To make the matter worse, the image appears to be inside a kindergarten classroom.

The teacher captioned the content with “sadomasochism training,” noting that parents and teachers were blocked from seeing his Weibo post — which was viewed more than 170 million times.

“This man is really disgusting,” one person commented. 

“The quality of teachers in private kindergartens is worrying,” another one has said.

The post received outrage online and the local police in the Chinese city of Ruijin, Jiangxi, was contacted to investigate the incident.

Local reports said that the teacher worked at a branch of the pre-school chain, RYB Education. It is one of the largest education providers in China.

After internal investigations, the RYB released a statement regarding the matter, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

In the statement, RYB explained that the teacher had asked several young students to smell his feet during playtime. However, the school denied any claims of child abuse or indecent behavior towards the boy or other children.

The RYB Kindergarten then confirmed that the teacher responsible had been fired as his actions had “seriously violated the daily behavioral norms of teachers in the kindergarten”.

Meanwhile, the boy’s mother initially downplayed the situation after she was informed by RYB. However, after seeing the Weibo post, she said she believed her son had been abused.

RYB kindergarten says that it supports police investigations and will take appropriate action as a result of its findings.

Moreover, Weibo users have questioned the standards of RYB Education following the latest incident to shocked the company.

Back in 2017, the kindergarten was accused of child abuse in one of its Beijing kindergartens where kids were allegedly injected with and fed dr*gs.

Those claims were later proven to be false. However, one  RYB teacher was jailed for 18 months for pricking students with a sewing needle.