At least 20 nursery school children died in Niger on Tuesday in a fire that trapped them in straw-hut classrooms in a school in a poor neighbourhood of the west African nation's capital, government officials said. "There were 20 deaths, most of them young children," said the head of Niger's fire service, Colonel Bako Boubacar. An official of a Niger's teachers union said the school in the popular Pays Bas neighbourhood had around 800 students, including children in the nursery section.