Endarasha (Kenya) (AFP) - At least 17 young children were killed in a fire that ripped through their primary school dormitory in central Kenya overnight, with initial reports Friday indicating it was overcrowded.

The blaze in Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri county broke out at around midnight, police said, engulfing rooms where more than 150 children were sleeping.

Police said the average age of the victims was around nine. The school, which caters to some 800 children, is located in a semi-rural area around 170 kilometres (100 miles) north of the capital Nairobi.

“The bodies recovered at the scene were burnt beyond recognition,” national police spokesperson Resila Onyango told AFP.

“More bodies are likely to be recovered once (the) scene is fully processed,” she added.

She said several children had been taken to a nearby hospital with injuries.

Many families were left waiting anxiously at the school gates to be reunited with their children.

“There has been very little information. They are telling us some children escaped but we are not being told to where,” said Francis Wachira, 33, who has a daughter at the school.

“The more I stay here the more my hope in finding the child is fading,” he told AFP.

An AFP journalist saw survivors wrapped in blue blankets against the cold, being loaded into school buses.

- Children ‘traumatised’ -

Speaking at the scene, Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said some children ended up in neighbouring homes.

“There are some children who are alive and well, but they are of course traumatised and they are in the hands of those who gave them refuge last night,” said Kindiki, adding that the authorities were still piecing together information.

Elisabeth Nyambura, 35, said her 13-year-old son had been found and taken home while she looked for one of his classmates.

“All he told me was that he saw smoke and they escaped through the window. I am just glad he is alive,” she said.

AFP footage showed the blackened shell of the dormitory, with its corrugated iron roof completely collapsed.

The cause of the fire was not yet known.

But Kenya’s National Gender and Equality Commission said initial reports indicated the dormitory was “overcrowded, in violation of safety standards” and called for an immediate inquiry.

- ‘Horrific incident’ -

President William Ruto, currently in Bejing for a China-Africa summit, expressed his condolences in a post on X.

“Our thoughts are with the families of the children who have lost their lives in the fire tragedy,” he said.

Ruto instructed officials to “thoroughly investigate this horrific incident”, and promised that those responsible will be “held to account”.

The dormitory was sealed off by yellow police tape, with officers stationed at all access points.

The Kenyan Red Cross said it was on the ground assisting a multi-agency response team and “providing psychosocial support services to the pupils, teachers and affected families”.

There have been numerous school fires in Kenya and across East Africa.

In 2016, nine students were killed by a fire at a girls’ high school in the sprawling slum neighbourhood of Kibera in Nairobi.

In 2001, 67 pupils were killed in an arson attack on their dormitory at the Kyanguli Mixed Secondary School David Mutiso in Kenya’s southern Machakos district.

Two pupils were charged with murder, and the headmaster and deputy of the school were convicted of negligence.

In 1994, 40 school children were burned alive and 47 injured in a fire that ravaged the Shauritanga Secondary School for Girls in the northern region of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

In 2022, a blaze ravaged a school for the blind in eastern Uganda. Eleven pupils died after they were trapped inside their shared bedroom because the building had been burglar-proofed, government ministers said at the time.