PESHAWAR — A roof gave way on top of a private school in Peshawar on Thursday morning, pancaking an upper storey onto classrooms below and killing at least 31 people — 30 of them schoolchildren between the ages of six and fourteen, and a female teacher. Dozens more were hurt. By late afternoon, rescue teams had declared the operation over and the debris fully cleared.
The collapse struck Al Khair Public School in the Afridi Abad locality, shortly before 9am, while classes were in session. One roof dropped onto the one below, and the classrooms beneath were crushed. Rescue 1122 — Pakistan’s emergency response service — rushed teams to the site, and locals were among the first to dig through the rubble by hand.
Two explanations have emerged for why the building came down. Rescue officials told CNN that heavy overnight rain had destabilized it. But Peshawar’s top police officer, Capital City Police chief Mian Saeed, was blunt: the building was weak to begin with, and someone had built on top of it anyway. “Its roof was overweight with construction on a weak structure that caused the collapse,” he told AFP. Police have arrested the school’s owner and opened a formal investigation.
The injured — around 50 children by the hospital’s count — were taken to Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar’s main public hospital, which declared an emergency. Most were discharged after treatment, but three children with severe head injuries remained under care late Thursday.
Samiullah, a father with six children enrolled at the school, got the call at 8:50am and reached the building within ten minutes. “I received a call from home at around 8:50am and reached the site about 10 minutes later, at around 9am,” he told Dawn. He carried three girls, all under eight years old, out of the rubble himself.
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari called the collapse a “heart-wrenching tragedy” and ordered a comprehensive investigation. “In this hour of sorrow, the entire nation shares equally in the grief of the affected families,” his office said. The governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — the province bordering Afghanistan where Peshawar sits — Faisal Karim Kundi, called it “an extremely painful tragedy” and demanded a detailed report on the cause. The province was placed under direct federal governor’s rule just two days ago, after a political emergency.
Behind the day’s horror is a pattern familiar across South Asia. Al Khair belongs to the vast world of small private schools that educate most of Pakistan’s urban working-class children — many operating in buildings never designed as schools, inspected rarely if ever. Building collapses are depressingly routine in Pakistan: codes exist, but enforcement often doesn’t, and unapproved extra storeys on weak frames are a classic recipe for exactly this kind of disaster. Police said the owner had been running the school as an education trust — the kind of arrangement that can blur who, precisely, is responsible for the bricks.
Which is why the owner’s arrest may be the most telling detail of the day. After building disasters in Pakistan, accountability tends to travel one floor up and stop. The national investigation Zardari ordered — and the detailed report demanded by Governor Kundi — will be watched for whether they follow responsibility further: to the inspectors who certified the building, if any ever did.
The story will barely register in most world capitals — a school collapse in a city many readers couldn’t find on a map. That is precisely the point. Millions of children across the developing world sit under roofs just as dubious every morning, and every monsoon season delivers another reminder that safe school buildings are not a rich-country luxury. The families grieving in Afridi Abad tonight are grieving a failure of enforcement, not fate.
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