Anxious parents are waiting to learn whether their missing children are alive after a boarding school in central Kenya caught fire.
The Ministry of Education confirmed 17 students had died as of Friday morning, while the vice president said 70 children were still missing.
It is believed some of these children may have run into local residential areas to escape the fire, or were picked up by their parents without the school knowing.
The fire broke out at a dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County and the cause is still unknown.
There were more than 150 students in the dormitory when the fire broke out around midnight local time. The average age of the victims was around nine years old, according to police.
John Githogo, the uncle of one missing boy, told journalists in Nyeri that waiting for news was “torture”.
“We were told that some died, some ran away, some were picked up by their parents.
“But we didn’t pick up our son. We don’t know if he ran away,” Mr Githogo said in frustration.
“We don’t know if he was among the dead, among the fleeing. This is torture.”
Francis Wachira, whose daughter attends the school, told AFP news agency that “there is very little information”.
“They told us that some children had escaped but we were not told where they had escaped to,” he said.
In an effort to find the children still missing, Kenyan Vice President Rigathi Gachagua has called on “every parent” who picked up their children from school to report to the authorities.
Fourteen children were taken to hospital with various injuries.
President William Ruto called the fire “horrific” and “catastrophic”, and has ordered an investigation.
“Those responsible will be held accountable,” Mr Ruto wrote on social media.
Police said a team of investigators, including forensic experts, had been deployed to the school.
According to a journalist from Citizen TV, a local television station, the fire spread very quickly because most of the buildings in the school are made of wood.
Earlier, police spokesman Resila Onyango told AFP that the bodies found were “burned beyond recognition”.
“More bodies could be found again [the] “The scene has been completely processed,” she said.
Firefighters extinguished the fire with the assistance of nearby residents, who were the first to respond.
Local official Samson Mwangi Mwema told the BBC the rescue operation was difficult: “We found the dormitory on fire, we tried to rescue – we found some children under the beds and saved them.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told the BBC it was running a temporary trauma centre at the school and providing Counseling for 59 children.
Hillside Endarasha Academy is a private primary school near the town of Nyeri – 150km (93 miles) north of the capital Nairobi.
The Kenyan Ministry of Education says the school has 824 students – 402 boys and 422 girls. Of that total, 316 are boarders.
Mr Gachagua said the government would assist families with burials and hospital bills.
He added that a report on the cause of the fire would be released once completed.
School fires are common in boarding schools in Kenya, where safety standards are a concern.
In 2022, a dormitory in western Kenya was set on fire, with several students arrested on suspicion of arson. The year before, there had been a spike in boarding school arsons.
In 2017, 10 students were killed in a fire at Moi Girls High School in the capital Nairobi.
At least 67 students were killed in Machakos County, southeast of Nairobi, in Kenya’s deadliest school fire in more than 20 years.
