Eleven teenagers dead after huge fire breaks out at Turkish school dormitory
ELEVEN teenage girls and a worker at a school dormitory were killed after a fire broke and fire escape doors failed to open as the children tried to escape.
Blaze tears through dormitory leaving many pupils dead
Officials have announced that at least 22 other girls were injured during the blaze which swept across the wooden interior of the school dormitory in southern Turkey.
The devastating fire is thought to have been started because of an electrical fault in the building.
Situated in Aldag, in the province of Adana, the fire also killed a caretaker who worked in the dormitory as well as the young girls who are all believed to have been under the age of 14.
The private dormitory housed 34 middle and high school students, according to officials, and it is believed the girls all came from poor backgrounds.
Firefighters battled the flames for three hours before managing to get the blaze under control
Students would stay in these dorms as the nearby villages where they came from had no schools.
The footage shows the severity of the flames as they engulf the three-story building, with fire teams attempting to put out the blaze.
A full investigation is underway to discover how the blaze started with the wooden interior of the building thought to be the reason behind the fire spreading so quickly.
Adana governor Mahmut Demirtas, told the Hurrieyet Daily News: "We have lost 12 of our citizens, 11 of them were students and one of them was an educator.”
Girls tried to escape out of the windows when the fire exit doors would not open
The fire began at around 7.25pm on Tuesday evening and took three hours to get under control.
Reports suggest the fire exits may have been locked or too difficult to open for the school girls as they panicked trying to flee away from the flames.
It is thought that the wooden floor was alight and then eventually the roof collapsed on the building.
Those injured suffered smoke poisoning, and some of the girls were hurt attempting to escape the blaze with some being forced to jump out of windows to safety.