Endarasha (Kenya) (AFP) - At least 17 young boys were killed and 70 missing after a fire ripped through a primary school dormitory in central Kenya, officials said Friday, leaving distraught relatives desperate for news of their loved ones.

The blaze at the Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri county began around midnight, engulfing rooms where more than 150 boys were sleeping.

“We still have 70 kids that are unaccounted – that does not mean they are perished or they are injured… the word is that they are unaccounted for,” Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua told reporters at the scene, adding that 27 children were in hospital.

Police said earlier that 17 children had been confirmed dead.

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

But Gachagua said the number of dead was not verified, urging relatives and members of the community to help in tracing the missing.

He described the scene as “gory” and said painstaking investigative work using DNA would be required to help identify the victims.

The government said the dormitory housed boys between grades four to eight, meaning the victims were aged between nine and 12 or 13.

Tensions were rising among families gathered at the school for news, and many broke down into wailing and tears after officials took them to see the charred bodies in the destroyed dorm.

“Please look for my kid. He can’t be dead. I want my child,” one woman said in distress as she left the school.

- ‘Panic mode’ -

The cause of the inferno was not yet known but Kenya’s National Gender and Equality Commission said initial reports indicated the dorm was “overcrowded, in violation of safety standards” and called for an immediate inquiry.

“We parents are in panic mode,” said Timothy Kinuthia, who has been hunting for news of his 13-year-old boy.

“We have been here since 5:00 am and we have been told nothing.”

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

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

The school, which reportedly catered to some 800 children, is located in a semi-rural area around 170 kilometres (100 miles) north of the capital Nairobi.

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

Alice Wanjiku said she had come from Nairobi to search for her orphaned nephew.

“We have not heard anything since morning. I will camp here until I find our baby. He is the joy of our family and I hope to find him.”

- ‘Traumatised’ children -

Speaking at the scene, Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said some of the pupils had 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.

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

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

The Kenyan Red Cross said it was on the ground assisting a multi-agency response team and providing psychosocial support.

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.