So it was a teenage girl’s senseless and overreaction to a punishment that claimed the lives of nineteen young people trapped in a fire in a school dormitory in Guyana. “A student is suspected of starting the devastating fire because her cell phone was confiscated from her,” police said in a statement on Tuesday, May 23.
The fire in question took place on Sunday evening, in Mahdia, a mining town in Guyana, a small English-speaking country located east of Venezuela and north of Brazil. Authorities quickly suspected a “malicious” act.
Dormitory officials “confiscated a young girl’s cell phone and she threatened to set the building on fire that very evening; everyone heard her,” a government source, who requested anonymity, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Tuesday, saying that this student had admitted the facts.
“[Students] are not allowed to have cell phones. However, they [the officials] had found this young girl with a telephone. Apparently she was sending photos,” the source said. The minor, currently hospitalized under police surveillance, went to the bathroom, sprayed insecticide on a curtain and set it on fire with a match, continued this source, assuring that several young girls gave the same version of the facts.
“According to the students, they were sleeping and were awakened by screaming. They saw fire, smoke in the bathroom, which quickly spread through the building, “constructed partly of wood, according to the police statement.
Seven patients still hospitalized
The drama was also compounded by the fact that the dormitory manager “freaked out” and couldn’t find the key that opened the building’s exit door, which had barred windows. It was locked every night at 9 p.m., the source added. The young son of this official is one of the nineteen dead.
Men then had to break down the door to allow the survivors, including the person responsible for the fire, to escape. The firefighters and the police arrived twenty-five minutes after the start of the disaster.
Thirteen young girls and one boy died on the spot, while five other minors died at the Mahdia district hospital. A hospital source in Guyana’s capital Georgetown told AFP that “seven patients were still hospitalized, two still in critical condition”.
Six autopsies were performed at the “hospital morgue and the cause of death was smoke inhalation and burns,” according to the police statement. The other 13 bodies, unrecognizable, “were transported to Georgetown” for “DNA testing” for identification, it added.
International experts
National Security Advisor, Retired Army Captain Gerry Gouveia announced that a team of forensic experts from Barbados had arrived in Guyana to assist in the identification of the bodies. She should be joined in the coming days by other forensic experts from the United States.
Guyana President Irfaan Ali, who called the tragedy a “major disaster”, said Cuba had offered to “provide full medical support inside and outside the country and to be a home for all medical needs”.
A small poor English-speaking country of 800,000 inhabitants, Guyana, a former Dutch and then British colony, has the largest per capita oil reserves in the world and hopes for rapid development in the years to come thanks to the exploitation of these reserves which is still in its infancy. Specialists estimate that the Guyana-Suriname basin contains around fifteen billion barrels of oil reserves associated with significant gas deposits.