11 children were killed due to a fire at a boarding school outside Uganda’s capital, Kampala.
“One of our dormitories caught fire and burnt at around midnight. The matron made an alarm,” Francis Kinubi, the school’s founder, said. “This was one of the dormitories for the young girls and it caught and burned down and, very unfortunately, 11 girls, small girls, perished.”
In their statement, the Police said that six other people were hospitalized in critical condition. They added that the cause of the fire that gutted a girls’ dormitory at Salama School for the Blind in the district of Mukono was yet unknown
Fatuma Ndisaba, a top official in Mukono, told NTV that the victims, including girls between the ages of 7 and 10, were burned beyond recognition. The victims’ bodies will be identified through DNA analysis, she said.
“You cannot tell who is who,” she said, speaking of the charred bodies.
Police cordoned off the scene, and military officials were seen investigating. Anne, Britain’s Princess, was expected at the school during her visit to the East African country.
Education officials say that fires at schools where classrooms and dormitories are often crammed were becoming rampant and there was usually no firefighting equipment in place. Officials have cited poor electrical connections as sparking blazes in some cases.
Kinubi, the Salama School for the Blind administrator, acknowledged a lack of safety equipment.
“I have to admit that we do not have systems like fire extinguishers because we have always been appealing to the government to provide us with some of these gadgets, but in vain,” he said.
Two dormitories at a prominent boarding school in Kampala were destroyed in separate incidents. No one was hurt.
In 2008, 19 elementary school students were killed in a nighttime fire at a boarding school in Kampala.
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