A fire raced through a primary school dormitory overnight in central Kenya, killing at least 17 students, police said Friday.<\/p>\n
The fire started out after midnight at Nyeri county’s Hillside Endarasha Academy, according to authorities, and engulfed rooms where students were resting.<\/p>\n
The primary school serves approximately 800 students aged five to twelve.<\/p>\n
“There are 17 fatalities from this incident, and others have been taken to the hospital with serious injuries,” national police spokesperson Resila Onyango told AFP.<\/p>\n
“The bodies recovered at the scene were burnt beyond recognition,” she informed us.<\/p>\n
According to police, the victims had an average age of roughly nine years old.<\/p>\n
According to Onyango, several others were injured, 16 of them critically, and were taken to a local hospital.<\/p>\n
“More bodies are likely to be recovered once (the) scene is fully processed,” said she.<\/p>\n
The cause of the fire is unknown, she said, but an inquiry has begun.<\/p>\n
President William Ruto offered his sympathies to those deceased.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur thoughts are with the families of the children who have lost their lives in the fire tragedy,\u201d he said in a post on X.<\/p>\n
“This is devastating news.”<\/p>\n
He stated that he had directed officials to “thoroughly investigate this horrific incident” and that those involved will be “held to account”.<\/p>\n
The institution lies in Nyeri county, about 170 kilometers (100 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi.<\/p>\n
The Kenyan Red Cross reported that it was on the ground aiding a multi-agency response team.<\/p>\n
It stated in a post on X that it was “providing psychosocial support services to the pupils, teachers, and affected families”.<\/p>\n
There have been numerous school fires in Kenya and throughout East Africa.<\/p>\n
In 2016, a fire destroyed a girls’ high school in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, killing nine students.<\/p>\n
In 2001, an arson attack on the dormitories of the Kyanguli Mixed Secondary School David Mutiso in Kenya’s southern Machakos county killed 67 students.<\/p>\n
Two students were charged with murder, while the school’s headmaster and deputy were convicted of carelessness.<\/p>\n
In 1994, a fire damaged the Shauritanga Secondary School for Girls in Tanzania’s northern Kilimanjaro area, killing 40 students and injuring 47 others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A fire raced through a primary school dormitory overnight in central Kenya, killing at least 17 students, police said Friday. The fire started out after midnight at Nyeri county’s Hillside Endarasha Academy, according to authorities, and engulfed rooms where students were resting. The primary school serves approximately 800 students aged five to twelve. “There are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":23008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[249],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47383,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376\/revisions\/47383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}