Deadly fire rips through boarding school in Kenya
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You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 15 hours GMT on Thursday the 28th of May. A fire has ripped through a girls' boarding school in Kenya, killing at least 16 pupils. Israel says it's carried out an airstrike on southern Beirut as it steps up its offensive in Lebanon. And the US says a ballistic missile launched by Iran overnight was a violation of their ceasefire.
Also in this podcast. There are so many similarities to the US President Donald Trump. The only difference is this is a buffalo and President Trump is a human being.
The Bangladeshi buffalo saved from slaughter because it looked a bit like the US President. The grim task of identifying victims from a fire at a school dormitory is underway in Kenya. At least 16 students died in the blaze in the early hours of Thursday at the Utumishi Girls Academy, about 100 kilometres northwest of Nairobi. Kenya's Education Minister, Julius Ogamba, gave this update from the scene. We woke up with the sad news of a fire incident at this school, Utumishi Senior School. About 12.45am a fire broke out in one of the domes on the second floor. The response teams of course managed to put out the fire by about 3am but by then the damage had already been done. Anxious parents gathered outside hoping for news of their loved ones including this distraught man looking for his daughter.
Please, can I go and check? I know my daughter, how she looks like. I know, she's very beautiful. I want to see my daughter! No, no, please. Don't lecture me! Don't lecture me, please! I want my daughter! Our reporter Thomas Mukwana spoke to us from the school. Behind me are parents who are still trying to find the whereabouts of their children, and that's been happening since morning here, Oliver. We can see the dormitory. It's a two-story dormitory, and you can't really see inside because you're far from it, but the bricks are still brown and gray as usual, but from the roof you can see the darkening color from the smoke. that engulfed the inside of that building. And that's all you can see from where we are.
But police are inside. It's hard to get through. And that tragedy, as it's being described by people who are here, is that these girls, most of the 79 that are injured, had to jump from that story, that first story of the first floor, to try and escape the fire. And that's why most of them allegedly broke their limbs trying to escape the fire. You can imagine the scene. It was frantic and traumatic, we could imagine, for all those girls, those 200 who were inside.
What happened in the deadly fire at Utumishi Girls Academy in Kenya?
Do we have any idea of how it started, the fire? Not yet, Oliver. We don't know why this fire started. The police are trying to investigate. We can throw a glance at the dormitory right now, but no-one's allowed to enter inside because police are trying to conduct investigations. Sadly, this is not the first of its kind here in Kenya. In 2024, the same thing happened at another school in Nyeri County, far from here. And that took with it 21 boys. It was a boys' primary school. And questions were raised at that time about the safety, especially fire safety in these schools. And the government put together an entire task force, and they put together a report. And part of the report found that 348 schools around the country did not have the safety requirements that are up to standard, and so they were shut down.
And the government claimed that that problem was something that they were looking into. But this tragedy, this new one, raises bigger questions. In the previous reports, the problem, as reported by the ministry at that time, according to the investigations, was that most of these dormitory doors open inward, which makes it harder for children who are trying to escape a fire to get out in time.
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