A fireplace tore through a dormitory at a women’ school in a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley in a single day, killing 16 students, the federal government mentioned on Thursday.
The hearth, whose trigger has not been established, broke out simply after midnight on the Utumishi Girls’ Academy Senior School in Gilgil in west-central Kenya and burned for greater than two hours, Education Minister Julius Migos informed reporters.
He mentioned 79 different students have been injured, though 71 of them had already been discharged from hospital.
Footage aired on Kenyan tv confirmed damaged window panes and smoke-stained partitions, whereas relations gathered outdoors the school gates to hunt information of lacking family members.
Fires are frequent at Kenyan colleges, with greater than 100 recorded in 2024, in response to the authorities. Many fires are set by students protesting harsh self-discipline and poor circumstances, researchers have discovered.
“Investigations are ongoing, but the identification of the cause of the fire (at Utumishi Girls’ Academy) is not yet identified,” Migos mentioned.
A fireplace in 2024 at a major boarding school in close by Nyeri County killed 21 students. Its trigger was by no means conclusively established.
“The fire started from an upper dome and spread all over within that time,” Eunice Mureithi, whose daughter escaped the hearth, informed the NTV tv station, referring to a part of the school’s construction.
“It had barricaded a part of the dome to one side and to the other side the students were unable to come out, but a lot of them were able to escape.”
In the worst school hearth of current occasions, 67 schoolboys have been killed in 2001 at Kyanguli Secondary School outdoors Nairobi, an incident the authorities attributed to arson.