At least 17 children died after a fire ripped through their primary school dormitory overnight in central Kenya, police said on Friday.

The blaze in Nyeri county’s Hillside Endarasha Academy broke out at around midnight, police said, engulfing rooms where the children were sleeping.

The primary school caters to some 800 pupils, aged between roughly five and 12.

“There are 17 fatalities from this incident and there are also others who were taken to hospital with serious injuries,” national police spokesperson Resila Onyango told AFP.

“The bodies recovered at the scene were burnt beyond recognition,” she said.

Police said the average age of the victims was around nine years old.

Several others were injured, Onyango said, 16 of them seriously, and had been rushed to a nearby hospital.

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

The cause of the fire remains unknown, she said, but an investigation had been launched.

President William Ruto expressed his condolences for those killed.

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

“This is devastating news.”

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

The school is located around 170 kilometres (100 miles) north of the capital Nairobi, in Nyeri county.

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

In a post on X, it said it was “providing psychosocial support services to the pupils, teachers and affected families”.

Deadly blazes

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 Kibera neighbourhood of Nairobi.

In 2001, 67 pupils were killed by 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 the 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.