By Staff Reporter
PESHAWAR: At least 28 people, almost all of them schoolchildren, have been killed after the roof of a private school collapsed in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, officials said.
Lady Reading Hospital (LRH) spokesperson Muhammad Asim said that the toll had risen from an earlier figure of 21 and included 27 students and a female teacher, with 19 people injured. Other accounts differed. Television channels reported 28 children, six of them girls, and a teacher killed, while a separate report cited two female teachers among the dead. The final figure has yet to be settled, and officials fear it could rise.
The roof of Al Khair School fell in on Thursday morning in the Afridi Abad area, also reported as Dir Colony, in the inner city. Peshawar Deputy Commissioner Afaq Wazir said pupils were in their classrooms at the time. Police said more than 40 people were injured. Asim said five of the injured were in a critical condition, and an emergency was declared at the hospital.
Rescue 1122, the provincial emergency service, said 40 people had been pulled from the rubble so far. Its spokesperson, Bilal Ahmed Faizi, said several people were feared still trapped. The service had earlier reported four deaths, citing LRH, before the toll climbed through the day.
“All the children were aged 13 or younger,” Asim said.
Samiullah, a parent who rushed to the scene, told Dawn newspaper he rescued three girls, all under the age of eight. He said he took a call from home at about 8.50am and reached the school roughly 10 minutes later. “We have six children studying at the school,” he said.
“When I saw the building, I thought my son, who was in a ground-floor classroom beneath the collapsed first floor, had also died,” he said. “However, he had left the classroom to drink water.”
Capital City Police Officer Dr Mian Saeed said the school’s owner had been taken into custody and a case would be registered. He said the roofs had been poorly constructed and that the school stood in narrow streets, which made the rescue difficult. A total of 110 children were enrolled at the school. The deputy commissioner has ordered a probe into the collapse.
Soldiers joined rescue workers and police at the site to help recover children and staff feared trapped and to move the injured to hospital. The provincial police chief, Zulfiqar Hameed, ordered the Peshawar police chief to oversee the operation and told traffic police to set up a “green corridor” so ambulances could reach hospitals without delay.
“In this hour of grief, KP Police stands with the affected families,” Hameed said, according to a statement.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor Faisal Karim Kundi sought a detailed report and told officials to establish the cause of the collapse. “The loss of precious lives of innocent children is an extremely painful tragedy,” he said.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed deep grief and ordered that relief work be sped up and all possible medical help given to the injured. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said Sharif had taken “serious notice” of the incident. In a post on X, Dar called for stronger safety standards in schools “to prevent such tragedies from recurring”.
President Asif Ali Zardari said the “heart-wrenching tragedy has plunged the entire nation into shock”. He called for a comprehensive investigation and for checks to ensure all school buildings met safety standards. Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari also expressed shock and urged the authorities to recover those still trapped as quickly as possible.
Building and roof collapses are common in Pakistan, where safety standards are poorly enforced and substandard construction materials are widely used.
Thursday’s disaster follows several others involving schools and children this year. In June, 14 children died when the roof of a private tuition centre collapsed in Lahore. Police said the building was old and an unfinished upper floor had given way, and the owner and another person were arrested. The collapse came less than two months after four children were killed and 20 people injured when a classroom roof fell in at a private school in Dera Ghazi Khan.
In July, three girls aged between three and 13 were killed when part of the outer wall of a government primary school near Umerkot collapsed on them. The same month, a child died and at least five others were injured when the roof of a private school under construction collapsed in Lahore’s Baghbanpura neighbourhood.
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