By: Staff Writer
June 2, 2023
The deadly Mahdia Secondary School fire that killed 20 students, 19 females and one male, was started when a cellular phone was taken from the 15 year old suspect now in custody, who had shared sexually explicit content via her cellular phone with an adult male admirer outside of the school.
The defendant who has been charged with 20 counts of murder will not be identified because she is classified as a minor. 19 students died immediately after the fire and one more died in hospital two days after in one of the most tragic events in Guyanese history.
“We have interviewed her, and she admitted to nothing,” Deputy Fire Chief Dwayne Scotland previously said.
The defendant appeared virtually at a hearing in a court south of the capital, Georgetown, and she was ordered held in custody pending further court proceedings.
Investigators accused the girl of igniting the blaze at Mahdia Secondary School in anger with the administrator over the confiscation of her cellphone. The government boarding school serves remote Indigenous villages in the country’s southwest.
The phone contained sexually explicit content of the defendant and an adult male with whom she was sexting, prompting school authorities to confiscate the phone in an attempt to break up the illicit affair.
The male has not been identified despite Caribbean Magazine Plus’s efforts to track him down. The defendant is represented by a team of lawyers led by Georgetown attorney Dexter Todd.
Gerald Gouveia, the national security adviser to Guyana’s president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, has said that the dorm’s administrator, or house mother, locked all the doors to prevent the female students, ages 12 to 18, from sneaking out to socialize with adult males in Mahdia, a gold and diamond mining town.
More than two dozen students were injured. One of the critically injured students has been flown to a New York hospital for treatment by a specialist, but most have been discharged.
Days before the fire the school was having difficulties in controlling the all-girl school population. A video shot two weeks prior to the deadly blaze at the school shows students convulsing and writhing on the floor in what onlookers said appeared to be a “demonic attack.”
The video was posted by a pastor who lives in Mahdia who goes by Facebook name David Innergrace Moore.
According to pastor Moore, these types of incidents take place on a regular basis in the Mahdia Secondary School dorms. He says he was called to pray for students on Sunday May 21 just hours before the deadly fire.
Citizens are also asking for a full investigation into the deadly blaze. Particularly, they want to know why the girls were locked into the compound with little to no escape outside of the school officials. In addition, they want to know how adult males were able to seduce the young girls inside when the school is supposed to be secured and supervised 24/7.