A fire killed 12 children at a boarding school in the western Ugandan town of Fort Portal, police said today.
The victims were boys and girls aged between seven and 13, police said. The Islamic East Kabarole Primary School had been using candles due to a power crisis that has caused blackouts across the country.
"It seems one pupil left a candle and it caught a bed sheet before spreading from there," a police spokesman said. "Of course, because they were small children, they couldn't know what to do put it out."
Witnesses in Fort Portal said volunteers rushed to the school with cans full of water in the early hours of Friday morning but were unable to save the victims.
The town is 320 kilometres west of the capital Kampala, near the border with Democratic Republic of Congo.