By Enyichukwu Enemanna
No fewer than 20 persons, especially students were on Sunday killed in a school dormitory fire in Guyana, the government announced in a statement, an incident the nation’s president called a “major disaster.”
“This is a major disaster. It is horrible, it is painful,” the South American nation’s President Irfaan Ali said Sunday.
The fire disaster at the Mahdia Secondary School in central Guyana also injured an undisclosed number of victims, the statement said further.
President Ali has ordered adequate care for victims in the capital, Georgetown’s two major hospitals “so that every single child who requires attention be given the best possible opportunity to get that attention.”
Private and military planes have been sent to Mahdia, located about 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Georgetown, as the region is affected by heavy rains.
Natasha Singh-Lewis, an opposition MP, called for an investigation into the fire’s cause.
“We need to understand how this most horrific and deadly incident occurred and take all necessary measures to prevent such a tragedy from happening again,” she said.
Guyana, a small English-speaking country of 800,000 people, is a former Dutch and British colony with the world’s largest per capita oil reserves, which it hopes will help spur rapid development.
