At least 17 children have died in a fire at a school in central Kenya on Friday, a police spokesman said. At least 70 students remain missing, Kenyan Vice President Rigathi Gachagua said. Emergency work continues at the school, the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Kieni, a boys’ boarding school in Nyeri County, in the centre of the country, 150 kilometres from Nairobi, the capital. President William Ruto has described the fire as “horrible” and “devastating” and has ordered an investigation to determine its causes, as well as declaring three days of mourning. Local media have reported that the bodies of the students have been left unrecognisable by the effects of the flames.
Our thoughts are with the families of the children who have lost their lives in the fire tragedy at the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County.
This is devastating news.
We pray for speedy recovery to the survivors.
I instruct relevant authorities to thoroughly investigate…
— William Samoei Ruto, PhD (@WilliamsRuto) September 6, 2024
“We have lost 17 pupils in the fire,” police spokesman Resila Onyango told Reuters. Onyango said the blaze spread through the school’s dormitories overnight. Twenty-seven people have been confirmed injured. The cause is still unknown. The Kenya Red Cross is providing psychosocial support services to those affected – pupils, teachers and their families. According to the BBC.
Of the deceased, “between 9 and 13 years old,” according to the authorities, 16 died at the school and another died in the hospital, picks up the local newspaper Daily NationThe death toll is not ruled out to rise once the school is thoroughly inspected. The school had dormitories whose structure, according to local press, was mostly made of wood.
Hours after the fire, the country’s vice president, Rigathi Gachagua, who visited the scene of the fire, said that 86 children had been located and that the whereabouts of the 70 missing were “unknown.” “This does not mean that they perished during the incident,” he said, according to Efe, and then explained that some could have been taken home by their parents, whom he asked to report to the authorities. For his part, the Minister of the Interior, Kithure Kindiki, said that “many children managed to jump and get to safety,” but added that he does not know how many of them were successful. The children’s relatives complain that they are receiving little information and describe the wait as “torture,” according to the BBC.
Following the tragic fire incident at Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri, the Kenya Red Cross, alongside a multi-agency response team, has been on the ground responding.
Eleven children have been taken to Nyeri Provincial General Hospital.
The scene is currently cordoned off…
—Kenya Red Cross (@KenyaRedCross) September 6, 2024
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The dormitory where the fire started had the capacity to accommodate 156 pupils, Kenya’s Principal Secretary for Basic Education Belio Kipsang said, although the number of pupils in the dormitory is not confirmed. The fire broke out at around 11pm (one hour less in mainland Spain); neighbours were the first to rush to the rescue of the pupils.
In September 2017, nine students died in a school fire in Nairobi. The deadliest school fire in Kenya occurred more than two decades ago, when more than 60 students perished in Machakos County, southeast of the capital.
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