25 die in Kuala Lumpur school blaze
Mostly teenage boys perish, trapped inside
TWENTY-FIVE people, mostly teenage boys, were killed yesterday when a blaze tore through a Malaysian religious school in one of the country’s worst fire disasters in years.
The blaze broke out before dawn in a tahfiz – an Islamic religious school – in the heart of the capital Kuala Lumpur.
Firefighters rushed to the scene and the blaze was out within an hour, but not before it wreaked terrible devastation.
Pictures in local media showed ash-covered, fire-blackened beds, as horrific accounts emerged of youngsters trying to escape the school as it went up in flames and neighbours hearing their terrified cries for help.
“The children were desperately trying to escape the flames,” Federal Territories Minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor said in a television interview.
“There were metal grills which prevented them from exiting the burning building.”
Kuala Lumpur police chief Amar Singh said the bodies were totally burned.
“Unfortunately there was only one entrance, so they could not escape. All the bodies were found lumped on one another.”
The Star newspaper reported that people in the area who had woken for morning prayers heard cries for help and saw flames engulfing the top floor of the building, where students were sleeping in dorms.
Kuala Lumpur’s fire and rescue department director Khirudin Drahman said it was one of the country’s worst fire tragedies in 20 years. Fire department officials said 23 students and two teachers were killed in the blaze.
Police chief Singh said the students who died were all boys aged between 13 and 17.
Adnan said the religious school, called Tahfiz Darul Quran Ittifaqiyah, had been operating without a licence.
Local media were reporting that officials had recently raised fire safety concerns about such private schools.
“The religious school did not have a operating licence from the local authorities,” Adnan said.
“The school also does not have any licence from the local religious authorities.
“There are many other religious schools [that operate illegally] in the country.”
Tahfiz are religious schools where children study the Koran in Malaysia, where over 60% of the population of about 30 million are Muslim.
The Star newspaper reported that the fire and rescue department had raised concerns about fire safety measures at unregistered and private tahfiz, and had recorded 211 fires at such institutions since 2015.
In August, 16 people including eight students fled an early morning fire at a family-run tahfiz in Baling, in the northern state of Kedah, the paper reported.
There were 519 tahfiz registered across the country as of April, but many more are believed to be unregistered, it said, adding that there was a major fire at a school in 1989 in the northern state of Kedah which killed 27 female students. In October last year, six people died in a fire that swept through the intensive care unit of a major hospital in the southern state of Johor. — AFP