A fire killed at least 18 boys and seriously injured 27 others when it tore through a dormitory at a boarding school in central Kenya in the early hours of Friday, police said.
The blaze occurred overnight at the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri, a primary boarding school with 800 students about 150km from the capital Nairobi.
Nyeri county commissioner Pius Murugu and the education ministry reported that the dormitory that caught fire housed 156 boys aged between 10 and 14. Since most of the buildings are built with wooden planks, the fire spread quickly.
Police are investigating the cause of the fire.
The country’s deputy president said that 70 children were unaccounted for. Vice president Rigathi Gachagua added that some may have been taken home by their parents in the night.
“Many children managed to jump out and get to safety, but we do not know how many were successful,” Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said while visiting the school.
“The government assures full accountability for all whose action or inaction contributed to this tremendous loss,” Kindiki later wrote on X.
He appealed for local residents who took in survivors to bring them back to the school so that they might receive medical help and counselling.
President William Ruto said he had told authorities to investigate what he called the “horrific incident” and said those responsible would be held to account.
“We saw several children in there that had been burnt,” Phillip Gathogo, a local resident, told reporters. “I was just lucky to save one of them, but I heard that he later died. It was a very troubling and sad tragedy.”
Authorities have cordoned off the school and crime scene investigators have been sent there, the Interior Ministry said.
The school has a total 824 students comprising 422 girls and the rest boys. Of these, 160 girls are boarders while the rest are day scholars, Belio Kipsang, the education ministry’s principal secretary, said in a statement.
Kenya has a history of school fires, many of which have turned out to be arson.
Nine students were killed in September 2017 in a fire at a school in the capital Nairobi that the government attributed to arson.
In 2001, 58 schoolboys were killed in a dormitory fire at Kyanguli Secondary School outside Nairobi. In 2012, eight students were killed at a school in Homa Bay County in western Kenya. - Reuters