Authorities in central Nigeria yesterday ordered an immediate inquiry after 27 schoolgirls were burned alive and scores injured when a blaze broke out in a hostel at their school.
The girls had been locked in overnight at the hostel to prevent them from getting out to meet boys when the fire broke out late on Monday, officials said.
The government of Plateau State in the centre of the country ordered a three-day period of mourning and an official inquiry, local radio reported. Contacts with Plateau State were difficult because of poor telecommunication connections to the area.
President Olusegun Obasanjo and other top officials were on a visit to Russia and Poland at the time of the tragedy and are scheduled to return to Nigeria today.
Police speaking to the staterun NTA television late on Wednesday said at least 23 students had died, but reporters said the toll was 27 dead with scores more injured, at least five of them seriously.
The fire started late in the girls' hostel of the government secondary school at BwalBwang-Gindiri, around 60 km south-east of Jos, police said.
A local reporter who visited the scene said the hostel had been burned to the ground and the victims' bodies lay outside the building on Wednesday. Relatives tried to identify the remains but many of the victims were burned beyond recognition, he added.
Another local reporter, Nora Amaka-Dike, told the BBC from the state capital, Jos, that the hostel had been locked from the outside, its doors secured by iron bars, when the fire broke out late at night in a small room near the front door. NTA said the doors were locked to prevent girls from "sneaking out" to meet boys. )
Some 165 girls were in the hostel when the fire broke out. The matron of the school was reported among the scores injured in the blaze who were being treated at two hospitals, the ECWA Evangelical Hospital and Jos University Teaching Hospital, Ms Amaka-Dike said.
Villagers alerted by the girls' screams had broken down the walls of the hostel to rescue those inside, she added.
A 15-year-old girl who was among the injured told reporters the fire had broken out in a small room next to the front door.
When the girls realised they were trapped there was a lot of shouting and a stampede to try to break out, before villagers managed to break through the walls, she said.