标签： Africa

A devastating early-morning fire at a Kenyan girls’ boarding school has left 16 pupils dead and dozens of families anxiously awaiting updates on injured loved ones, as law enforcement announced the arrest of eight current students suspected of orchestrating the suspected arson attack.

The blaze broke out in the early hours of Thursday at Utumishi Girls Academy, located in Gilgil, roughly 120 kilometers northwest of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. The fire quickly spread through the dormitory, which housed 135 bunk beds and held hundreds of sleeping students, destroying the upper floor of the building. Initial conflicting reports on the fire’s starting location are still being clarified by investigators.

In an official statement, Kenya’s National Police Service confirmed that after conducting interviews with surviving students and school staff, alongside a forensic analysis of campus closed-circuit television footage, the eight students were formally identified as persons of interest linked directly to the planning and execution of the fatal fire.

Detectives traced the suspects, who were among 30 students initially summoned back to the campus for questioning, to their private residences across the country before taking them into custody. Students who had remained in the Gilgil area were also located and detained, with eight ultimately placed under formal arrest. Investigations remain ongoing to confirm the full sequence of events and the exact motive behind the attack.

This tragedy is far from an isolated incident in Kenya, where boarding school fires have become a persistent, deadly public safety crisis. Just two years prior, a similar dormitory blaze in central Kenya killed at least 21 people. A long-running review of these incidents shows that many have been linked to arson, often attributed to disgruntled students protesting strict school discipline, poor living conditions, or institutional policies. Other fires have been ruled accidental, but systemic failures have repeatedly amplified death tolls across the country.

Overcrowding in student dormitories, routine non-compliance with basic fire safety protocols — including blocked emergency exits and locked interior windows — have been cited as key contributing factors to the high number of casualties in nearly all major Kenyan school fire incidents. As this story develops, anxious families continue to gather at the school and local hospitals waiting for word on injured students who have begun returning for follow-up care and investigation interviews.

This is a developing breaking news story, updated by the original reporting team at BBC Africa. Additional details will be released as the investigation progresses, and audiences can access ongoing updates via the BBC News App or by following BBC Africa and BBC Breaking on social media platforms.

CAIRO – A deadly attack on unarmed civilian communities in Sudan has drawn international condemnation after a local humanitarian monitoring group documented the deaths of 27 people, including multiple elderly residents, during one of Islam’s most sacred annual holidays. The Sudan Doctors Network, a non-partisan group that tracks violent incidents across the conflict-torn nation, issued a statement Friday blaming fighters aligned with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the Thursday assaults on multiple small villages in the al-Murrah region. This area sits west of Barah town in North Kordofan, one of the war’s most active frontlines, and has been free of any organized military presence from the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

The attack unfolded on the second day of Eid al-Adha, the “Feast of Sacrifice” celebrated by more than 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, marking a violent interruption to a holiday focused on peace, community, and ritual. The monitoring group emphasized that the deliberate targeting of undefended civilian villages and the mass killing of residents in this brutal manner represents a clear, unambiguous violation of international humanitarian law. It added that the assault has further exacerbated the catastrophic humanitarian conditions that millions of Sudanese civilians have already endured throughout the 15-month full-scale conflict between the SAF and RSF.

Tensions between Sudan’s national army and the RSF, which built their power and influence during decades of former authoritarian rule, boiled over into open war in April 2023. What began as clashes in the capital Khartoum quickly spread across the country, with the Kordofan region emerging as one of the conflict’s central battlefields. Fighting across the area has intensified in recent months, with both sides deploying drone technology to strike targets deep behind enemy lines. The RSF and its allied militias currently control most of Sudan’s western Darfur region, as well as large swathes of Kordofan along the border with South Sudan – both resource-rich territories holding extensive untapped oil reserves and profitable gold mines. Control of Barah, a strategic population center in North Kordofan, has been a repeated point of bloody clashes between the two warring factions for months.

This latest attack comes on the heels of a string of mass casualty incidents across Sudan that have underscored the growing risk to civilians caught in the crossfire. Earlier this month, violent clashes between fighters aligned with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North and the Otoro tribe in South Kordofan left more than 61 people dead, including nine children. Just one week prior, a drone strike on a crowded open-air market in central Sudan killed 28 civilians and wounded dozens more.

To date, the ongoing Sudanese conflict has officially been linked to at least 59,000 confirmed deaths, a toll human rights organizations and aid groups warn is a drastic undercount. More than 13 million Sudanese have been displaced from their homes, with roughly half forced to flee across international borders, and large swathes of the country are already facing catastrophic famine conditions. United Nations data indicates that more than 30 million Sudanese – nearly two-thirds of the country’s total population – require urgent life-saving humanitarian assistance. Both the SAF and RSF have been repeatedly accused by the United Nations and independent global human rights groups of committing widespread war crimes and atrocities against civilian populations, including systematic ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial executions, and widespread sexual violence used as a weapon of war. Aid access to most active conflict zones across Sudan’s vast territory remains severely restricted, meaning the true human cost of the conflict will likely remain unknown for years.

A Kenyan High Court has issued an interim order blocking the United States from launching a dedicated Ebola quarantine and treatment facility for American citizens on Kenyan soil, a decision that comes after widespread public anger over fears of heightened cross-border infection risks to the East African nation.

According to a senior unnamed U.S. official, the 50-bed isolation center — whose exact location has never been made public — was set to be staffed entirely by U.S. medical personnel and scheduled to begin accepting patients as early as Friday. The facility was designed to treat and quarantine U.S. citizens who may have been exposed to the ongoing Ebola outbreak centered in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which has also recorded a small number of cases in neighboring Uganda. The official confirmed that an initial team of trained medical staff, fully prepared in proper personal protective equipment use and evidence-based quarantine protocols, had already deployed ahead of the facility’s launch.

“We’re going to be ready to take care of our citizens as needed,” the official said, noting that Kenya was chosen for its geographic proximity to the outbreak zone, which would allow for timely medical care for exposed Americans.

The legal challenge that led to the court ruling was brought by the Katiba Institute, a Kenyan human rights organization, which argued in its petition that the unregulated arrangement posed “grave and imminent risks” to Kenya’s public health. Justice Patricia Nyaundi, the presiding High Court judge, ruled that all activities related to establishing, operating or approving any Ebola quarantine, isolation or treatment facility run by a foreign government on Kenyan territory would be suspended until the full case can be heard. The order also bars Kenyan authorities from allowing any Ebola-exposed or infected individuals into the country under the proposed U.S. program.

As of Friday, Kenya — East Africa’s largest economy — had not recorded any confirmed Ebola cases linked to the current outbreak. Congolese health authorities report the outbreak has already caused at least 220 deaths and more than 900 confirmed infections, while Uganda has recorded seven cases and one death.

The court’s decision follows days of growing public outcry and fierce criticism from domestic medical groups, after reports of the U.S. plan emerged. Many Kenyans took to social media to express anxiety, questioning whether the country had sufficient biosecurity and containment infrastructure to safely manage potential Ebola cases. The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU), Kenya’s largest doctors’ union, has emerged as the most vocal opponent of the plan, accusing the Kenyan government of conducting secret “backdoor negotiations” with Washington and demanding the immediate public release of all bilateral agreements related to the proposal.

The union has questioned why Kenya, which is not at the epicenter of the outbreak, was selected to host the facility, and has condemned the plan as a violation of Kenya’s national sovereignty. Echoing widespread claims that Washington refused to accept Ebola patients on U.S. soil, the union stated: “If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya.” KMPDU Secretary General Davji Bhimji Atellah said the union “will not sit back and watch Kenya be treated as a containment colony for a lethal pathogen that we did not generate.”

The union also raised strong objections to plans to staff the facility exclusively with U.S. personnel rather than local Kenyan healthcare workers, warning that it would create a discriminatory “apartheid healthcare model” on Kenyan soil that would not be tolerated. The union issued a 48-hour ultimatum to the Kenyan government, demanding full disclosure of all negotiation details or face a nationwide strike by medical professionals. “Kenya is a sovereign republic, not a geopolitical isolation ward,” the union added.

Kenyan President William Ruto has not directly addressed the controversy over the U.S. facility, but he addressed broader global health cooperation during a meeting with foreign diplomats in Nairobi on Thursday. “We agreed on the importance of cooperation and avoiding isolationism, recognising that public health threats do not respect borders and require coordinated regional and global action,” Ruto said, adding that “Kenya will continue to act transparently, responsibly, and decisively to protect lives while contributing to regional and global health security.”

Shortly after Ruto’s meeting, a spokesperson for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that Rubio had spoken with Ruto by phone on Thursday. The spokesperson added that the U.S. plans to provide $13.5 million (£10.7 million) in aid to support Kenya’s domestic Ebola preparedness efforts, part of a larger $112 million U.S. commitment to regional outbreak response across Central and East Africa. The Kenyan government has not yet issued any direct official comment on the proposed facility itself.

NAIROBI, Kenya — A landmark ruling from Kenya’s High Court on Friday has paused Washington’s controversial proposal to build a dedicated quarantine facility for U.S. citizens exposed to the rare Bundibugyo Ebola strain spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, capping off days of fierce public pushback from local medical workers, legal groups and activists.

The U.S. plan, first revealed by an anonymous administration official earlier this week, would route any American exposed to Ebola while working or traveling in the outbreak region to this new Kenyan facility, rather than repatriating them back to the United States for monitoring and care. Key details of the project remain undisclosed as of Friday: the proposed site for the facility within Kenya has not been released, and it remains unclear whether the Kenyan government had formally approved the plan prior to the court’s suspension.

Top Kenyan officials have only acknowledged that preliminary talks with U.S. counterparts regarding Ebola preparedness support have taken place, declining to comment directly on the quarantine facility proposal. In a recent public statement, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the U.S. government has committed $13.5 million in funding to boost Kenya’s domestic Ebola preparedness capacity.

The High Court’s ruling puts all negotiations and procedural steps for the facility on hold until Tuesday, when the court will hear formal petitions challenging the project brought by two independent legal organizations: the Katiba Institute, a non-profit group dedicated to defending Kenya’s constitution, and the Kenya Law Society. The Kenya Law Society has called on the court to invalidate any existing agreements between the two nations for the project, arguing that the proposal poses severe unaddressed public health risks and was advanced without any meaningful public input.

The group further argued that Kenya currently lacks the specialized high-containment infrastructure required to operate a safe Ebola quarantine facility, which would leave local communities exposed to catastrophic avoidable harm.

Local medical professionals have joined the opposition in force. The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union issued a 48-hour strike notice on Thursday, warning that industrial action would begin immediately if the government moved forward with the deal. Union leaders condemned the plan, arguing that the U.S.’s refusal to accept exposed citizens on its own soil makes Kenya a dumping ground for high-biosecurity risks.

“As the vanguard of Kenya’s healthcare system, we are utterly disgusted by the government’s apparent willingness to trade national biosecurity and the lives of its citizens for foreign aid,” union chairperson Davji Atellah said in a public statement.

The pushback comes amid a growing, underreported public health crisis in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where frontline health workers have been struggling for months to contain an outbreak of the Bundibugyo virus, a rare member of the Ebola family that has no approved vaccine or specific treatment.

Congolese authorities declared the outbreak on May 15, and have since recorded more than 1,000 suspected cases, with at least 220 confirmed deaths. But public health experts from the World Health Organization warn that the virus spread undetected for weeks before the outbreak was declared, meaning the actual number of infections and fatalities is far higher than official counts. The outbreak has already spilled across the border into neighboring Uganda, where seven confirmed cases and one death have been reported to date.

A new shipment of life-saving medical supplies donated by the European Union has arrived in Bunia, the northeastern Congolese town at the center of an unprecedented outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, arriving as frontline medical teams battle acute equipment shortages, community distrust, and persistent violence from armed groups across the volatile region.

A white cargo plane touched down at Bunia’s airport early Thursday, unloading pallets of masks, medical gloves, protective boots, and antiviral medications—all supplies that local health facilities have reported running critically low on for weeks. United Nations-marked forklifts moved the sealed aid crates onto waiting trucks, bound for treatment centers across Ituri province, the global epicenter of the outbreak that has already spread beyond Congo’s borders.

On-the-ground reporting from the Associated Press reveals the stark gaps in the current response: emergency treatment centers in Bunia sit largely understaffed and under-resourced, while clinicians in the nearby town of Bambu have been forced to use expired surgical masks when caring for patients showing classic Ebola symptoms.

At least three targeted attacks on Ebola treatment facilities have been recorded in Ituri in recent weeks, sparked by local resident protests over public health measures that conflict with traditional community burial practices. These attacks have amplified the already extreme risk facing local and international health workers deployed to contain the spread.

Jérôme Kouachi, the lead of emergency operations for UNICEF in the Democratic Republic of Congo, confirmed to AP that this initial aid delivery is the first of multiple scheduled shipments that will roll out over the next eight days, part of a scaled-up international response to the crisis.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Thursday he is traveling directly to Congo to assess containment efforts on the ground. The Bundibugyo strain at the center of the outbreak has no officially approved vaccine or targeted treatment, and the WHO previously declared the event a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the body’s highest alert level, to accelerate global aid mobilization.

Since Congolese authorities first declared the outbreak on May 15, officials have confirmed more than 1,000 suspected cases and at least 220 deaths. But public health experts warn the virus circulated undetected for weeks before the official declaration, meaning the actual caseload is far higher than official counts. The outbreak has already spilled across Congo’s northern border into Uganda, where health officials have confirmed seven cases and one fatality. On a small positive note, Congolese authorities announced Wednesday that the first confirmed survivor of the strain has been discharged from a treatment facility after recovering.

Congo’s Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner framed the response effort earlier this week as a high-stakes race against time: “We are trying to catch up,” she said.

A new report from international humanitarian organizations released Thursday outlines the wide range of systemic barriers slowing the response, from customs bureaucracy that delays aid shipments, to inadequate cold storage for medical supplies, to poorly maintained rural roads and spotty telecommunications networks that leave remote communities cut off from care.

Tedros issued an urgent appeal this week for an immediate ceasefire across all conflict zones in eastern Congo, a region that has been plagued by interlinked insurgencies and ethnic violence for decades. “We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling,” he said.

Ituri province, located in northeastern Congo just kilometers from the Ugandan border, has been overwhelmed by repeated attacks from the Allied Democratic Forces, a rebel faction affiliated with the Islamic State, as well as a coalition of ethnic militias. Just two months ago, ADF fighters killed at least 40 local residents and burned dozens of homes in a series of raids across the province.

The outbreak has now spread south from Ituri to two additional Congolese provinces, North Kivu and South Kivu, where the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group controls major population centers including Goma and Bukavu. Rebel officials have already confirmed two Ebola cases within areas under their control. Goma’s main international airport, a critical logistics hub for all humanitarian aid entering eastern Congo, has remained closed since January 2025, when M23 forces seized control of the city.

Decades of persistent conflict in eastern Congo have created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 7 million people internally displaced across the region, leaving millions more vulnerable to the spread of the virus with limited access to healthcare.

This report was contributed by Ope Adetayo from Lagos, Nigeria.

Beneath the tropical sun off Central Africa’s coast, the Bamy Hotel on Bioko Island looks indistinguishable from any luxury resort from the outside: palm trees frame a sweeping driveway, polished marble lines the foyer, and a stately portrait of Equatorial Guinea’s long-ruling president hangs behind the mahogany front desk. But behind this polished facade, the once-bustling property has been transformed into an improvised prison for asylum seekers, part of a secretive $7.5 million agreement between the authoritarian Equatorial Guinean government and the former Trump administration, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The AP gained rare access to the site during a recent trip accompanying the first papal visit to the country, making it the only international news outlet to directly report on conditions inside the locked-down hotel. Since the agreement took effect late last year, the property has remained eerily empty of the tourists and business travelers it was built to host. Only a small cohort of detainees, all asylum seekers deported from the United States, remain confined within its walls, held against their will far from their home countries.

According to legal representatives for the detainees, at least 32 people have been held at the Bamy Hotel since November. Every single one had already received formal protection from deportation by U.S. judges, who ruled they faced grave danger if forced to return to their home nations across Africa. To date, 25 of these protected asylum seekers have already been forcibly transferred back to the countries they fled, while the remaining detainees face relentless pressure from Equatorial Guinean authorities to agree to repatriation.

Immigration legal experts describe these third-country deportation deals as a deliberate legal loophole crafted by the Trump administration to bypass U.S. asylum protections. Rather than directly deporting at-risk seekers back to dangerous home countries in violation of U.S. court orders, the administration instead sends them to intermediate nations like Equatorial Guinea, where authorities can then force them to complete the journey home.

As an authoritarian state with widespread reports of human rights abuses, Equatorial Guinea restricts nearly all access for foreign independent journalists, making on-the-ground reporting extremely rare. What the AP found inside the hotel is a surreal blend of luxury accommodation and psychological torture: detainees wander empty, ornate corridors, staring out at a shimmering swimming pool they are barred from using, trapped in a country most had never heard of before their arrival. Men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Mauritania make up the detainee population, and all have reported no physical abuse — but overwhelming psychological distress from the constant threat of forced return to countries where they face persecution, imprisonment or death.

“I am scared and depressed,” a 26-year-old East African detainee told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, like the two other detainees interviewed for this report. Because of his ethnicity and his previous activism in his home country, he said he is certain he will be killed if he is forced to return. Human rights experts confirm all detainees held at Bamy Hotel face a high risk of severe persecution upon repatriation.

The Trump administration’s third-country deportation strategy has resulted in thousands of asylum seekers being sent to roughly 24 nations not their own, according to advocacy group Third Country Deportation Watch. Most of these partner nations are in the developing world, with roughly a dozen located across Africa. Immigration policy experts say nations like Equatorial Guinea agree to take these detainees to earn political and economic goodwill from the U.S. in ongoing negotiations over trade, foreign aid and migration policy.

The daily routine for detainees is mundane, the 26-year-old detainee recounted, but made deeply unsettling by the surreal setting and constant uncertainty. Detainees sleep in high-end hotel rooms that are rarely cleaned, and eat rice and meat at linen-covered tables in the closed hotel restaurant. After falling ill multiple times from contaminated food, the East African man said he now eats only the absolute minimum to survive. A local local lawyer provides basic supplies: new toothbrushes, cellphone SIM cards, and sanitary products for female detainees. Medical care is inconsistent at best: when the man developed an eye problem, he was taken to a hospital quickly, but when he contracted malaria and typhoid, authorities waited until his condition had severely deteriorated before arranging care, leaving him severely weakened and requiring intravenous treatment.

The psychological abuse is even more severe. When the man recently complained to a local police officer about his unlawful detention, the officer responded by telling him his problems would end if he simply went to the fourth floor and jumped out a window. “What can I do now? It’s become worse,” he said, his frail body shaking as he spoke. “I started losing my mind.”

The relationship between the U.S. and Equatorial Guinea is a complicated one, defined by deep economic ties even as U.S. officials repeatedly condemn the country’s abysmal human rights record and systemic corruption. A former Spanish colony, Equatorial Guinea descended into economic chaos after gaining independence in 1968, but the discovery of massive offshore oil reserves in the 1990s, developed largely by U.S. energy companies, turned the country into one of Africa’s wealthiest by per capita GDP. Almost all of that oil-fueled wealth has been siphoned off by long-ruling President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his family, rights groups report. His son and heir apparent, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Obiang Nguema, openly flaunts his corrupt fortune on social media, posting videos of private jet travel, infinity pool vacations and lobster feasts — even though the platform is banned for ordinary Equatorial Guinean citizens.

International sanctions were previously levied against Teodorin Obiang over his role in systemic corruption, but the U.S. lifted those sanctions just weeks before the first deportees arrived at Bamy Hotel, allowing him to travel to New York for a high-level U.N. meeting. Today, U.S. companies remain Equatorial Guinea’s largest foreign investors, and the U.S. government funds military training for the country’s security forces. Independent dissent is virtually non-existent: the Obiang administration has been repeatedly accused by the U.S. State Department and global human rights groups of detaining, torturing and extrajudicially killing political opponents.

For the remaining detainees at Bamy Hotel, every day brings new uncertainty: they know they could be deported at any time. The U.N. International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency visited the hotel in November and promised detainees they would return to assist with their cases. They have not been back since. The 26-year-old East African man is the only remaining detainee who has been allowed to meet with legal representation. Though Equatorial Guinea has no formal asylum framework, his lawyer submitted a formal asylum request to the prime minister’s office, a long-shot attempt to secure his release. He was told he would need to beg for mercy directly from Vice President Teodorin Obiang, and his claim was ultimately rejected. The next morning, authorities deported five other detainees, and told him he would be next.

Neither the Trump administration nor the Obiang administration responded to requests for comment on the $7.5 million deal or the conditions at the Bamy Hotel. A State Department spokesperson offered only a broad statement: “we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration.”