GILGIL (Reuters) – A fire tore through a dormitory at a girls' school in a town in Kenya's Rift Valley overnight, killing 16 students, the government said on Thursday.
The fire, whose cause has not been established, broke out just after midnight at the Utumishi Girls' Academy Senior School in Gilgil in west-central Kenya and burned for more than two hours, Education Minister Julius Migos told reporters.
He said 79 other students were injured, although 71 of them had already been discharged from hospital.
Footage aired on Kenyan television showed broken window panes and smoke-stained walls, while family members gathered outside the school gates to seek news of missing loved ones.
Fires are common at Kenyan schools, with more than 100 recorded in 2024, according to the government. Many fires are set by students protesting harsh discipline and poor conditions, researchers have found.
CAUSE OF FIRE NOT YET ESTABLISHED
"Investigations are ongoing, but the identification of the cause of the fire (at Utumishi Girls' Academy) is not yet identified," Migos said.
A fire in 2024 at a primary boarding school in nearby Nyeri County killed 21 students. Its cause was never conclusively established.
"The fire started from an upper dome and spread all over within that time," Eunice Mureithi, whose daughter escaped the fire, told the NTV television station, referring to part of the school's structure.
"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 fire of recent times, 67 schoolboys were killed in 2001 at Kyanguli Secondary School outside Nairobi, an incident the authorities attributed to arson.