AT LEAST 31 Guatemalan girls were burnt to death in a locked children’s home dormitory on Wednesday after trying to flee sexual abuse there.

Dozens more were taken to hospitals in the capital Guatemala City, many with severe burns. Others remained missing and bodies could not be identified as they were so badly burnt.

Grief-stricken parents and other relatives desperately searched for their children and demanded answers, amid suspicions that arson was to blame for the horrific tragedy.

The incident at the Virgin of the Assumption Safe Home in San Jose Pinula, south-east of Guatemala City, began on Tuesday when dozens of teenagers escaped from the institution for victims of familial abuse and disabled children.

Many relatives said the children — both boys and girls — had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of older residents at the home, which was meant to shelter them but where they had to earn their keep through working if their parents did not pay for their stay.

One 15-year-old girl being treated for minor injuries at Guatemala City’s Roosevelt Hospital said male residents over the age of 18 had invaded the girls’ area, causing them to flee in fear.

Most were caught and returned to the home, where they were locked in their dormitories overnight.

At about 9am on Wednesday, fire broke out in one of the girls’ dormitories.

The government’s Welfare Secretary Carlos Rodas claimed that they had set fire to their own mattresses.

But firefighters and Roosevelt Hospital staff reportedly said that a flammable liquid, probably petrol, had been used — suggesting that the abusers had set fire to the room to silence their victims.

“We don’t shirk responsibility, we accept it,” Mr Rodas said.

“We cannot recover those lives but we can analyse the system, make it transparent.”

He said the shelter had an official capacity of 500, but was housing at least 800 young adults and children — some as young as three.

General prosecutor Anabella Morfin had previously vowed to “deinstitutionalise” the home and reduce the population to 580. Ms Morfin said the horror was all the “more terrible as this could have been avoided.”

The tragedy occurred on International Women’s Day in a country where the annual murder rate of 600-700 women and girls — out of around 6,000 murders in total — is a national scandal.

President Jimmy Morales responded by announcing three days of national mourning.

• On Tuesday, up to 50,000 small farmers marched through the capital to demand Mr Morales’s resignation over corruption allegations.