Dressed in blue plastic gowns with masks over their faces, firefighters and medical workers carefully lifted tiny bodies of children as young as two years old from the Hope in Christ Home in the town of Newcastle, AFP reported.

Photos showed the workers using plastic sheeting to carry the childrens bodies into a field nearby as the orphanage smoldered.

Thirteen children died in the blaze, Mandla Ngema, spokesman for the provincial social development department, told AFP.

The shelter in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal was a “home of safety” for orphans and other children in danger, he said.

But a fire erupted around dawn that gutted the building, destroying documents that might have identified the victims, many of them burned beyond recognition, police said.

“Police were called to the scene at 600 am and the house was still alight,” spokesman Jay Naicker said.

“Police helped the fire department to put out the fire but it was too late, the house burnt down. Nine people have been taken to the hospital with burn wounds.” The cause of the fire was not immediately known, he added.

Authorities could not say how many people were living at the orphanage when the fire erupted.

“Fire broke out this morning. We have not established the cause. We have employed the services of a Pretoria-based company to investigate,” Ngema said.

The dead included the director of the home and her four children, Ngema said.

The children killed in the blaze were aged two to 15, he added.

South Africas crippling AIDS epidemic has left the country with an estimated 1.5 million orphans, in a country of 48 million people.

A study by the Institute of Race Relations predicted that by 2015, one third of all the children in South Africa would have lost one or both parents.

The government currently provides support to about 238,000 AIDS orphans and to more than 20,000 homes where older children care for younger siblings after their parents died from the disease.

Nearly 495,000 AIDS orphans are in foster care, but the government is encouraging more adoptions so orphans can have permanent families.

But only a tiny fraction of the AIDS orphans, about 1,900, were adopted by South Africans in 2008, a drop of nearly 13 percent from the previous year.

Parliament is expected to approve a new child protection act in April, which will create new rules for adoptions while setting out measures to combat trafficking and other abuses against children.