A fire that gutted a dormitory at a girls' school in Kenya early Thursday has left at least 15 students dead and dozens others injured, according to police reports.
Gilgil police station said at least 15 female students died at Utumishi Academy in Gilgil, Nakuru County, about 122 km northeast of the capital Nairobi, according to a police report cited by Reuters news agency.
A police source told AFP that 16 people had died, most of them children, and 73 were hospitalized. The cause of the blaze in the dormitory, where about 220 female students were sleeping, has not yet been confirmed.
This is the latest deadly school fire in Kenya in recent years. In 2024, 21 male students died after a fire destroyed their dormitory at a boarding school in central Kenya. In 2017, nine female students died in a fire at a school in Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum.
In 2016, there were about 120 cases of students setting fire to their own dormitories. A 2022 report by Kenya's Auditor General found that most public secondary schools were not prepared to handle fires.
The Kenya Red Cross said on X that the fire in Gilgil was reported around 3:30 a.m. Thursday. "Many students have been evacuated and are receiving treatment at various hospitals," the organization said. "A multi-agency response is ongoing involving the county fire brigade, the county disaster response team, @PoliceKE and the Kenya Red Cross."
Masoud Mwinyi, an assistant to Kenya's Deputy Inspector General of Police, told local media that officers were searching for students who may have escaped the fire but had not yet been accounted for. "We are combing the area because due to the shock, fear and anxiety, many ran away and it was nighttime," he said.
Dozens of parents gathered at the school on Thursday morning, anxiously seeking information about their children. Wambui Nderitu told the BBC that her niece survived the fire but broke her leg. She added: "Some of them upstairs had to jump out, that's why they were injured."
