A total of 21 boys were confirmed dead on Saturday after a blaze tore through a school dormitory in central Kenya, while another fire broke out at a girls’ school also in the center of the country, with conflicting reports about injuries.
Earlier Saturday, the nation’s top prosecutor said he had instructed police to look into whether the deadly inferno at the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County had been caused by negligence or recklessness.
The flames engulfed a boys’ dormitory at the school at about midnight on Thursday as more than 150 pupils aged nine to 13 were sleeping.
Photo: Reuters
A total of 19 bodies had been recovered from the site and another two had died in hospital, Government spokesman Isaac Mwaura said.
Of the 156 boys in the dorm at the time, 139 had been accounted for, he said.
“It is a catastrophe beyond our imagination,” Mwaura told a news conference.
Homicide teams and forensic experts on Saturday stepped up their investigations at the school, with DNA tests to be conducted to identify the victims
Kenyan Chief Government Pathologist Johansen Oduor said postmortems would begin tomorrow.
Meanwhile, another fire broke out on Saturday night at Isiolo Girls High School, about 140km to the northeast.
Isiolo County Communications Director Hussein Salesa said that two or three buildings had caught fire.
“There are some injuries, but we cannot confirm the exact figure at the moment,” he said.
National police spokeswoman Resila Onyango said in a statement the flames had been contained with help from the army, and that there had been “no injuries” among students and staff.
Thursday’s blaze has highlighted the issue of safety at schools in Kenya, after numerous similar disasters over the years.
The Kenyan National Gender and Equality Commission said initial reports indicated the dorm was “overcrowded, in violation of safety standards.”
“This incident raises serious concerns about children’s rights to safety in educational institutions,” the non-governmental organization Vocal Africa wrote on X.
President William Ruto has declared three days of national mourning from today after what he described as an “unfathomable tragedy.”
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