Teenage girl in Guyana is charged with 19 murders in school dormitory fire

A 15-year-old student accused of deliberately setting fire to a girls’ school dormitory in Guyana that killed 18 of her classmates and a 5-year-old boy was charged as an adult on Monday with 19 counts of murder.

The defendant appeared virtually at a hearing in a court south of the capital, Georgetown, and she was ordered to be held in custody pending further court proceedings.

Investigators accused the girl, who was not identified, of starting the fire at Mahdia Secondary School out of anger at the administrator over the confiscation of her mobile phone. The government boarding school serves remote indigenous villages in the southwestern part of the country.

The student was not allowed to plead the charges and will appear in court for a second time on July 5, when state and defense attorneys will indicate whether they are ready to begin a preliminary trial. If found guilty, the student could face life in prison.

The fire at the school in Mahida, about 200 miles southwest of Georgetown, started shortly before midnight on May 21. All five doors were locked from the inside with keys, officials said. There were 57 female students in the wooden concrete dormitory when the fire swept through the building in Mahdia municipality. Rescue workers removed at least 20 students from the building, which was reinforced with iron grilles.

More than two dozen students were injured. One of the seriously injured students has been airlifted to a New York hospital for specialist treatment, but most have been discharged.

Officials originally said the suspect, who was one of those injured, was 14. However, fire officials who interviewed her claimed she was 15, which – if true – led to the adult charge.

“We have interviewed her and she has not admitted anything,” Deputy Fire Chief Dwayne Scotland said earlier.

Gerald Gouveia, the national security adviser to Guyana’s President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, has said that the dormitory manager, or housemother, locked all the doors to prevent the female students between the ages of 12 and 18 from sneaking out to socialize with grown men in Mahdia, a gold and diamond mining town.

The caretaker panicked and fumbled with the keys as the fire swept through the building, they said. Officials previously identified the 5-year-old boy who died as her son, according to local news outlets.

Mr. Ali, senior officials and western diplomats planned to go to Mahdia. Last week, the government held a candlelight vigil for the dead and injured in Georgetown. Mr Ali said he had assigned a minister to each of the affected families to provide any assistance they might need.

Those in attendance included some of the injured students who had been taken to a Georgetown hospital but were well enough to be discharged Tuesday night. Many wept, heads bowed, faces covered, as a moment of silence was observed for the victims.

Beverley Alert, an opposition lawmaker, denounced the government for bringing the surviving victims to the vigil for what she described as a spectacle “to score cheap political points”.

In a social media post, she also said: “These girls have suffered a major trauma. They need to be with their family.”