At least seven students have been killed and scores wounded after a classroom collapsed in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, according to emergency services.

The incident at the two-storey Precious Talent Top School took place a few minutes after 7am local time (04:00 GMT) on Monday.

Al Jazeera correspondent Catherine Wambua-Soi said that rescue efforts were finished, with reports of seven deaths and 64 injured so far.

“It was a two-storey structure that was constructed using metal sheets and some wood, and a concrete slab to separate the two stories,” Wambua-Soi said, reporting from the location of the accident.

“People we’ve talked to said the concrete slab was reinforced very poorly and the government has said it wants to investigate how safe the building was,” she added.

According to Kenya Red Cross communications manager Peter Abwao, the school has some 800 pupils aged below 14.

Wambua-Soi added that the private school was located in a relatively poor neighbourhood.

“Children who come to this school would probably come from families that are not able to afford more expensive private schools, and the nearest public school was about two kilometres away,” she said.

“It’s schools like this one that are regularly badly constructed, made of iron sheets and concrete that is poorly reinforced.”

Wambua-Soi said the mostly-poor parents might not even be able to pay for the hospital, but that the government has promised it will foot the hospital bills for those affected by this.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a rare public rebuke to Tanzania over its failure to provide detailed information on suspected Ebola cases.

In a statement on Saturday, the UN health agency said it learned on September 10 of the death of a person in Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, two days earlier.

On September 11, WHO was “made aware of unofficial reports” the individual had tested positive for Ebola.

“Identified contacts of the deceased were unofficially reported to be quarantined in various sites in the country,” the agency’s statement said.

It added that WHO had also learned of two other non-fatal suspected infections, one of which reportedly tested negative, but despite repeated requests was provided with no further information from the country’s authorities on any of the three cases.

“To date, clinical data, results of the investigations, possible contacts and potential laboratory tests performed … have not been communicated to WHO,” the statement said.

“The limited available official information from Tanzanian authorities represents a challenge,” it added.

The Tanzanian government formally informed WHO on September 14 that it had no confirmed or suspected cases of Ebola. Health Minister Ummy Mwalimu told reporters on the same day that officials had investigated two recent cases of unknown illnesses, but they were not Ebola.

A Tunisian court has turned down a request to release jailed media mogul Nabil Karoui, who, along with academic Kais Saied, has advanced to a runoff in Tunisia’s presidential election.

Karoui, who was arrested in August on money laundering and tax evasion charges, finished second behind Saied in Sunday’s election.

“The judge has refused to give a ruling, saying it was not in his jurisdiction,” lawyer Kamel Ben Messoud said on Wednesday, after requesting his release the previous day.

National Enterprise Development Initiative (NEDI) in partnership with GIZ; a European Union trust fund project recently concluded ten days food processing training for forty youth, drawn from across the country.

Held at Rural Development Institute in Mansakonko, Lower River Region, the project aimed to train youth on agro-food processing and entrepreneurship. Participants were divided into two badges of twenty, for five days per group.

The training is also meant to encourage young people to venture into agriculture and business to reduce unemployment in The Gambia. It was conducted by food technology service unit of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Former DR Congo health minister Oly Ilunga has been arrested over allegations he embezzled public funds to tackle the Ebola epidemic, police said on Saturday.

Ilunga, who resigned as health minister in July after being removed as head of the country’s Ebola response team, was detained while hiding in an apartment in the capital Kinshasa ahead of a bid to flee the country, officers said.

He is in custody due to “misdemeanors of the mismanagement of funds allocated to the Ebola response,” police spokesman Colonel Pierrot-Rombaut Mwanamputu told AFP.

Ilunga will be referred to prosecutors on Monday, he added.

It comes after Ilunga was questioned in August as part of an inquiry into the management of funds to fight the outbreak, which has claimed more than 2,000 lives since August 2018.

Ilunga, 59, had already been banned from leaving the country.

He stepped down after criticising plans by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) to introduce a new, unlicensed vaccine to fight the epidemic.

His lawyer told AFP in September that some payments had been made to local chiefs after the killing of a WHO doctor in April.

More than 200,000 people have been vaccinated during DR Congo’s tenth and most serious Ebola epidemic.

It is the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history after more than 11,000 people were killed in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016.

Thirty-six people are missing after a boat sank in the Congo river on the outskirts of Kinshasa, DR Congo police said on Sunday.

Seventy-six people survived after the vessel went down overnight on the outskirts of the capital, the police wrote on Twitter.

The vessel, which was traveling to the capital, went down overnight in Maluku commune, about 100 kilometers from the center of the city.

“The cause of the accident is not yet known,” police spokesperson Colonel Pierrot-Rombaut Mwanamputu told AFP.

Lake and river transport is widely used in Democratic Republic of Congo as the highway system is poor, but accidents are common, often caused by overloading and the unsafe state of vessels.

The boat involved was called a “baleiniere” or “whaler” — a commonly-used flat-bottomed vessel between 15 to 30 meters (50 to 100 feet) long by two to six meters wide.

In the vast majority of accidents, passengers are not equipped with life jackets and many cannot swim.

A 27-year old man from Guinea and two Egyptians, aged 24 and 26, were taken into custody in a detention centre in Messina, Sicily, after police gathered testimony against them from other migrants.

The arrested men had crossed the Mediterranean themselves, landing in Lampedusa before being transferred to Sicily.

Witnesses said the three ran a prisoners’ camp in a former military base in Zawyia in Libya, where those ready to attempt the perilous sea crossing were forcibly held until they could pay a ransom.

Those interviewed said they had been “beaten with sticks, rifle butts, rubber pipes, whipped or given electric shocks”, and had seen other prisoners die, police said.

They had also been refused water or medical attention for their wounds or for diseases contracted in the camp, they said.

Anyone unable to pay up was passed on to other traffickers “for sexual and/or work exploitation”, or was killed.

The testimonies were gathered from migrants spread in reception centres across Sicily and on the island of Lampedusa.

“All the women who were with us… were systematically and repeatedly raped,” one witness was quoted as saying.

“They gave us seawater to drink and, sometimes, hard bread to eat. We men were beaten to get our relatives to pay sums of money in exchange for our release,” he said.

“I saw the organizers shoot two migrants who had tried to escape”.

 ‘Shot for bread’

Another said he was “whipped by electrical wires. Other times I was beaten, even around the head”.

One survivor described how the electric shocks “made you fall to the ground unconscious”, adding that he had “personally witnessed many murders by electric shock”.

Some migrants died of hunger, according to another cited witness, who described seeing a jailer “shoot a Nigerian in the legs for having taken a piece of bread”.

Libya, despite being wracked by chaos and conflict since the 2011 uprising that killed the dictator Moamer Kadhafi, has remained a major transit route for migrants, especially from sub-Saharan Africa.

According to figures from the International Organization for Migration in July, at least 5,200 people are currently trapped in official detention centres in Libya, often in appalling conditions.

There are no figures for the number of people held in illegal centres run by human traffickers, who brutally torture them to try to extort money from their families.

Italy’s tough line on migrants arriving from North Africa, and European Union cooperation with the Libyan coastguard, has seen some of those attempting the crossing picked up at sea and returned to the chaos-wracked country.

The UN and aid groups have warned those returned face rampant human rights abuses in both official and illegal centers