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Orphanage fire in Haiti kills at least a dozen children

14 February 2020 21:32 (UTC +04:00)

At least a dozen children died in a fire that swept overnight through an orphanage in Haiti run by a Pennsylvania-based Christian non-profit group, Haitian authorities said on Friday, APA reports quoting Reuters.

“This was a very tragic incident,” Institute for Social Welfare Director Arielle Jeanty Villedrouin told Reuters, saying the priority now was to find a new home for surviving children from the Orphanage of the Church of Bible Understanding on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

“We are going to place them in a transit center while we do research on their family and see if we can reunite them with their parents,” she said.

She did not elaborate and the cause of the fire, as well as the exact number of victims, were not immediately clear.

Many of the children in the orphanages of the poorest nation in the Americas have living parents who gave them up because they were too impoverished to look after them.