By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: Police have registered a criminal case against the four owners of a private tuition centre and the contractor who built it, alleging they were piling soil onto an already decaying roof when it collapsed on a room full of students, killing 14 children, a senior police official said Wednesday.
The charges, filed a day after the collapse in a low-income neighbourhood of Lahore, came as grieving families buried the children in a nearby cemetery, with mourners carrying the small bodies through the narrow streets of the Kahna area on bedframes before funeral prayers at a local mosque.
Deputy Inspector General of Police for Operations Faisal Kamran said both the property owner and the contractor who constructed the house were among two people taken into custody as part of the investigation. Police said evidence was being collected at the scene and that strict action would be taken against anyone found responsible.
NEGLIGENCE ALLEGED IN POLICE COMPLAINT
According to a first information report (FIR) seen by Reuters, the tuition centre operated inside a house owned by four men identified as Rehan, Faizan, Usman and Umar. The complaint, filed by a Lahore Metropolitan Corporation official who said he reached the site shortly after the collapse to find children buried under rubble, said Rehan’s wife had been teaching students in one of the rooms and was injured when the roof gave way.
At the time of the collapse, the FIR said, Rehan, Usman and Umar were working alongside a contractor identified as Umair to spread soil across the roof of the building, which it described as already in a dilapidated state. “Due to their negligence and the extra load, the roof of the room collapsed,” the report said.
The case was registered at Kahna police station under sections of the Pakistan Penal Code covering manslaughter and causing hurt through a rash or negligent act.
Punjab’s chief minister, Maryam Nawaz, directed police and district authorities to determine individual culpability for possible further criminal proceedings. Lahore’s city commissioner, Marryam Khan, said in a statement that those responsible would be identified “through a transparent, unbiased and immediate investigation.”
Separately, Nawaz announced payments of 2 million rupees ($7,190) to the families of each child killed and 500,000 rupees to those injured, according to a statement from her adviser, Zeeshan Malik. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he had prayed for the injured and directed authorities to ensure they received all necessary medical care, his office said.
FUNERALS AS COMMUNITY DEMANDS ACCOUNTABILITY
The collapse occurred at around 5 p.m. Tuesday, trapping about 20 people, including students and a teacher, under rubble and debris. Rescue workers using spades and their bare hands dug through broken brick, twisted steel and shattered concrete to reach survivors, some of whom were pulled out in critical condition. The dead ranged in age from around four to 12, medical sources said.
By Wednesday, the search-and-rescue operation had given way to mourning. Hundreds of people gathered for funeral prayers before the children were carried to the graveyard for burial; some families lost more than one child in the collapse.
Residents said the community’s grief was compounded by anger that the building’s poor condition had been widely known. “Everyone knew that the condition of the building was very poor,” said Muhammad Farooq, 30, whose daughter was among those killed. “But we had no choice,” he said, citing a shortage of affordable schooling options in the neighbourhood.
Zaheer, 45, whose niece died in the collapse, said repair work had been under way on the roof while classes continued beneath it. “The roof was in poor shape,” he said. “They put a lot of weight on the roof and that’s why this has happened.”
Aas Muhammad, 48, a resident who said several families had lost multiple children, called on authorities to conduct structural inspections of schools and other institutions attended by children. “No child should ever be placed at risk simply for seeking education,” he said, describing the disaster as a “wake-up call.”
According to Punjab’s education minister, the tuition centre operated from a private home belonging to a teacher who taught children from the surrounding low-income neighbourhood.
PART OF A WIDER PATTERN
Roof and building collapses are a recurring hazard in Pakistan, a country of more than 240 million people, where poor construction standards and substandard materials are common. Tuesday’s disaster came less than two months after a classroom roof collapsed at a private school in Dera Ghazi Khan, killing four children and injuring 20. A subsequent investigation found that roof, too, had been overloaded with sand and bricks during construction of a building extension.
Two young sisters were killed and a cousin injured in a separate collapse in Muzaffargarh on Monday, while three members of one family died earlier this month when the roof of an under-construction room collapsed in Faisalabad’s Jaranwala tehsil. Last July, 27 people were killed and 10 injured when a five-storey building collapsed in the impoverished Lyari area of the southern port city of Karachi.
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