Peshawar buries its children as school owner is arrested over roof collapse

Peshawar buried its children on Thursday, hours after the roof of a private school fell in on morning classes, as police arrested the school’s owner and the provincial government began asking who had allowed the building to stay open.

Lady Reading Hospital spokesperson Muhammad Asim confirmed that 30 students and a female teacher were killed at the Al-Khair school. Other counts given by officials on Thursday were higher, as many as 35. The hospital received 61 people, and 30 were sent home after treatment. Some of the injured were in critical condition, and the children who died were mostly between six and 14.

Funeral prayers were held in the city, attended by Governor Faisal Karim Kundi, who is running Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under governor’s rule, and hundreds of mourners, many of them relatives of the dead.

“The loss of precious lives of innocent children is an extremely painful tragedy,” Kundi said.

A weak building

Rescuers said the roof of an upper floor gave way and crashed onto the classroom below, crumpling two storeys of the three-storey building. Second and third-grade children were in class at the time. One injured teacher, Mahwish Zaman, said it felt as if the sky had fallen.

Peshawar police chief Mian Saeed Ahmed has blamed the structure itself. “Its roof was overweight with construction on a weak structure that caused the collapse,” he said. After his arrest, the owner, named by police as Mohammad Khan, was reported to have blamed this week’s rain for weakening one of the roofs. Police said their investigation was continuing.

The provincial private schools regulator has said Al-Khair was registered in March, but that no technical staff took part in its inspection.

Who signed off

Kundi said the first step of the inquiry was to establish who had issued the school’s no-objection certificate. He announced compensation of Rs1 million for each family that lost someone and Rs200,000 for each injured person, and ordered a structural safety audit of educational institutions across the province. “We cannot allow the safety of our children to be compromised,” he said.

The Chief Secretary has set up a fact-finding committee, including transport secretary Zubair Ahmed and Communications and Works chief engineer Jamshid Ali Khan, and given it seven days to report. A separate panel from the education department, led by Private Schools Regulatory Authority chairman Javid Iqbal, is looking at causes and prevention, and district committees have been told to inspect private school buildings within three days.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the governor, asked for a full report and directed that those responsible face action under the law. President Asif Ali Zardari said: “The entire nation shares the grief of the affected families in this hour of sorrow.”

UNICEF’s representative in Pakistan, Pernille Ironside, urged that every public and private school meet building safety standards and be inspected regularly. “Unicef stands ready to support the government’s response by providing psycho-social support,” she said.

The disaster follows a string of deadly collapses in Pakistan this year. In June, 14 children died when the roof of a tuition centre fell in Lahore’s Kahna area; an inquiry later found it had been running from an unregistered house.