33 killed as school roof collapses in Peshawar

At least 33 people, among them 32 schoolchildren aged between 7 and 14 and a female teacher, were killed on Thursday morning when the roof of a private school collapsed in the Afridi Abad area of Peshawar, according to Dawn’s updated count. Early reports had put the toll at 31, including 30 students and the teacher, and the figure rose as hospital lists were reconciled.

The school owner has been arrested, the prime minister’s office said, and a fact-finding committee has been asked to establish why the building failed.

What happened

Rescue 1122 spokesman Bilal Ahmad Faizi said one roof had come down on another, crushing the classroom below and trapping children inside. Peshawar Deputy Commissioner Afaq Wazir told Dawn that the roof of Al-Khair School had collapsed while students were in their classrooms.

A rescue official told AFP that the ceiling fell on the students after the roof of a higher floor gave way, crumpling both storeys. Capital City Police Officer Dr Mian Saeed Ahmed said the structure was weak. “Its roof was overweight with construction on a weak structure that caused the collapse,” AFP quoted him as saying.

Deputy Commissioner Wazir later confirmed that the rescue operation had ended. “Rescue teams have cleared all the debris, and no more injured children are at the scene,” he told Geo News.

Parents and neighbours pulled children out

Residents were among the first to reach the rubble. Samiullah, a parent who rushed to the site after a phone call from home at about 8:50am, told Dawn he rescued three girls, all under the age of eight. Six of his own children study at the school. When he first saw the building, he said, he feared his son, who had been in a ground-floor classroom beneath the collapsed first floor, was dead. The boy had stepped out to drink water.

Another resident, Sohail, told AFP that panic spread through the neighbourhood after his niece escaped the building and ran home to raise the alarm. When he arrived, he said, he saw 10 to 15 children trapped under the rubble, with debris piled up to their necks, and neighbours pulled them out.

Hospital toll

An emergency was declared at Lady Reading Hospital (LRH). According to the official list of casualties shared by the hospital, 61 people were brought there. Thirty were discharged after treatment. The hospital’s spokesman, Muhammad Asim, said the dead included students aged between seven and 14 and a female teacher.

Government response

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi called the loss of the children “an extremely painful tragedy” and sought a detailed report. He also ordered a structural safety audit of educational institutions across the province to “identify potential risks and ensure that immediate corrective measures are taken wherever necessary”. “We cannot allow the safety of our children to be compromised,” he wrote on X.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Department formed a fact-finding committee that includes Javid Iqbal, chairman of the Private Schools Regulatory Authority, and Muhammad Farooq, a deputy secretary of the department. It was asked to find the cause, recommend preventive measures and report back. Provincial Inspector General of Police Zulfiqar Hameed ordered a “green corridor” for ambulances.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had taken “serious notice”. The prime minister phoned the governor, was told that the school owner had been arrested, and directed that all aspects be examined and action taken against those responsible under the law. “No parent should have to endure such pain,” he wrote on X, promising a thorough investigation and steps to protect children in schools across the country.

President Asif Ali Zardari expressed “profound shock and grief” and stressed that all school buildings must meet safety standards.

A pattern of collapses

Dawn’s timeline of school structure failures since 2021 lists no earlier incident with a higher toll, though such collapses are far from rare. It lists the collapse of a private tuition centre’s roof in Lahore’s Kahna area that killed 14 children, a wall collapse at a Karachi school that killed five, and a wall that killed three girls near Umerkot. Many other incidents injured students when classroom roofs, ceilings or boundary walls gave way, often at private schools that were building extra floors or rooms without permission, or at dilapidated government buildings.

Why it matters

Dozens of families in one neighbourhood have lost a child in a single morning, and the cause the police have pointed to, extra construction piled on a weak building, is a preventable one. The audit the governor has ordered is the step that decides whether other classrooms in the province are checked before another extension is added. Parents will be watching to see whether the inquiry names those responsible and whether the findings are made public. Read our earlier report on children injured when a school van caught fire in Murree.

This article draws on reporting by Dawn and AFP.