15 September 2017 12:31 pm
Two dozen children, some just seven years old, died in a fire at a religious boarding school in Malaysia early yesterday.
The fire started in one of the bedrooms on the third floor of the Darul Quran Ittifaqiyah Tahfiz Centre in Kuala Lumpur.
Most of the victims -23 children and two adults -were asleep in their dormitories when the fire broke out.The room in which the fire started -20ft by 40ft- was said by a fire brigade spokesman, quoted by the New Straits Times, to have been littered with charred bodies.
At least 15 bodies were found huddled together on another floor, it was reported.
Some of the children who died were aged as young as seven, others were in their mid-teens.
A survivor told how there was chaos, with fire preventing students from escaping from the sweeping blaze.
In the hours after the fire, family members rushed to the scene, only for some to be told that their child had died in the blaze.
Mourning parents could be seen standing outside the school as emergency services tended to the scene.
Muhammad Roslan, 15, told the New Straits Times ‘when I woke up, fire had already engulfed the front door,’ he said.‘I broke a window and grabbed a pipe attached to the outside of the building and used it to escape to the ground,’ he said.
Malaysia, (Daily Mail), 14 September 2017