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Death Toll of Kenyan School Fire Rises to 61
The number of students killed in a most deadly fire on Monday in Kenya rose to 61, with nine others still missing, Minister of Education Science and Technology Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka said on Wednesday.
Addressing the Kenyan Parliament, he said that 28 students who were injured in the blaze were being treated in hospitals in Nairobi and Machakos, and many of them suffered severe burns.
Earlier official reports had put the death toll at 58 when an inferno broke out on early Monday morning engulfing a boarding school dormitory in Machakos town, 64 kilometers southeast of Nairobi.
There has been wide speculation that arson may be the cause of the fire, and Musyoka admitted that some irregularities on the campus were indeed reported before the fire.
He said that on March 23, some unknown persons circulated leaflets calling on students in the Kyaguli mixed secondary school not to attend that morning's school assembly to protest the cancellation of the final examination results by the ministry.
Later that day, the school's headmaster received information that students had detected the smell of petrol in one of the dormitories, however, a thorough search in the vicinity revealed nothing, he said.
The government has launched investigations to establish the cause of the fire, he said while calling on the public to provide every piece of relevant information to the investigating team.
Most of Kenya's secondary school students attend boarding schools. In March 1998, a similar fire killed more than 20 schoolgirls in a locked dormitory of a secondary school near Kenya 's Indian Ocean Port of Mombasa.
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