Blaze at Thai boarding school kills 18 girls

Eighteen girls aged between five and 12 have been killed in a fire at a boarding school dormitory in northern Thailand.

A police source said five other girls were injured, two seriously, in the blaze in the Chiang Rai province.

He said two of the bodies were so badly burned they were unidentifiable.

Some girls survived without injuries, but it was not known how many.

Firefighters took three hours to extinguish the blaze and pulled survivors and bodies from the second-floor window of the wooden building.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known.