A fire tore through a dormitory at a girls' secondary school in a town in Kenya's Rift Valley overnight, killing 16 students, the government said on Thursday.
The fire 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. Students at the school are aged between 15 and 18 years.
"Investigations are ongoing, but the... cause of the fire is not yet identified", Migos said.
Speaking to reporters at the school, Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen urged people not to speculate on the cause of the fire.
However, multiple survivors told first responders that a student had lit a mattress with a match, said one first responder, who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
They did not know what the student's motive might have been.
Doors on the second floor where the fire started were initially locked and some students died while jumping out of the windows, the first responder said.
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.
The fire broke window panes and left the walls of the school stained with smoke. Hundreds of family members gathered on Thursday morning to seek news of their loved ones, Reuters witnesses at the scene said.
"The fire started from an upper dome and spread all over within that time", said Eunice Mureithi, whose daughter escaped the fire, 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".
A fire in 2024 at a primary boarding school in nearby Nyeri County killed 21 students. Its cause was never conclusively established.
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. — AFP
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