Children among dead at Algeria foster care home blaze - president

Eleven people have died in a fire at a foster care facility in Algiers, Algeria's capital city.

The country's civil protection department said 19 others were injured in the blaze, which firefighters began to tackle at 03:30 local time (04:30 GMT) on Thursday.

They were still attempting to extinguish the fire just over three hours later, when the authorities released an update on the situation.

The civil protection department's statement did not specify the ages of those killed or injured, but in a social media post Algeria's president said children were among the dead.

"At around 03:00, we heard the fire engines arriving and the children screaming," Abdessalam Merrah, who lives nearby, told the AFP news agency.

"We helped as much as we could, but unfortunately we were told that 11 people had already died."

Ten fire engines and 16 ambulances were deployed to the facility in Mohammadia, an eastern suburb of Algiers.

Algeria has been experiencing a heatwave for several days, and nearly 1,000 fires have been recorded in the space of a week, AFP said.

On Thursday morning, the civil protection department said it had recorded 115 wildfires over the past 24 hours.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune expressed his condolences following the fire at the children's home, calling the incident a "tragic loss".

Prime Minister Sifi Ghrieb travelled to two hospitals in Algiers to visit injured individuals, state media reported.

The article was accompanied by a picture of Ghrieb next to a child in a hospital bed.

Amid the fire, five people with special needs were "taken into care and transported to a safe location", the authorities said.

Opposition figures and social media users have demanded answers from the authorities following the tragedy.

For instance, the opposition Jil Jadid party has called for a transparent investigation into fire and legal accountability for any negligence or safety failures.

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