Peshawar School Collapse Kills Dozens of Kids in Pakistan

The Peshawar school collapse has left Pakistan reeling after a roof gave way on Thursday morning and killed dozens of kids who were just starting their school day. According to Al Jazeera, at least thirty-four students and one teacher died at the Al-Khair Education Centre, a private school in the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. It is being described as the deadliest building collapse the country has ever seen.

The Peshawar school collapse struck at about eight forty-eight in the morning local time, while lessons were underway. Peshawar's police chief, Mian Saeed, told Reuters that more than one hundred ten students were packed into three classrooms, one on each floor of a three-story building. When the roof of a higher floor came down, it crumpled the two storeys beneath it.

What happened inside the school

Television footage showed rescuers clawing through the debris with their bare hands and carrying bloodied children to waiting ambulances along a narrow alley. As reported by the Guardian, the dead include twelve girls and a female teacher, according to Lady Reading Hospital spokesperson Mohammad Asim. Most of the victims were under thirteen, and the oldest child hurt was fourteen.

At least forty-five children were hurt, with injuries ranging from minor wounds to severe trauma. Three kids were still in critical condition with head injuries late in the day, while many of the less seriously injured were treated and sent home. The hospital declared an emergency to cope with the flood of patients.

Rescue work lasted four to five hours. Emergency services spokesperson Bilal Faizi said nearly one hundred rescuers took part, including parents who jumped in to help, and he credited the fast evacuation with saving at least forty lives. Parents crowded outside the building and the hospital, desperate for any word about their children.

Who is being blamed for the Peshawar school collapse

Police say the building was simply not safe. "It was a weak building structure," Saeed told Reuters. "Its roof was overloaded with construction on a weak structure, which caused the collapse." Earlier he accused those responsible of huge negligence for seating children from three classes in such a fragile building in a congested alley.

The school's owner, Mohammad Khan, has been arrested. After his arrest, police say, he blamed this week's rains for weakening one of the roofs, and the investigation is still under way. Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder reported that the structure was held up by steel girders, mud bricks and, in some places, wooden beams.

Relatives want answers fast. "Make an example of them, a lesson for all, so that no one dares open a school just to make money without providing facilities," said Mohammad Zaman, who lost two nephews. According to Arab News, families also accused the school administration of ignoring concerns about the condition of the building before the roof came down.

Government response and compensation

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi attended funeral prayers for the victims and visited the site. He said an inquiry team has been formed and that investigators will first establish who issued the school its no-objection certificate. "Whoever is found responsible for the incident will face action," he said, as quoted by Arab News.

The governor announced compensation of one million rupees, about thirty-six hundred dollars, for each family that lost someone, and two hundred thousand rupees for each injured person. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif phoned the governor, ordered the best possible medical care for the injured and asked for a full report. President Asif Ali Zardari said the entire nation shares the grief of the families.

A pattern Pakistan keeps repeating

This is not the first time kids have died in a crumbling building here. In June, at least fourteen children were killed when the roof of a tutoring centre collapsed in a run-down building in the eastern city of Lahore, according to the Guardian. That tragedy prompted calls for tougher oversight of private educational spaces, especially those operating out of ordinary residential buildings with no real safety inspections.

The money problem sits underneath all of it. The Guardian reports that Pakistan spends less than one percent of its roughly four hundred fifty billion dollar economy on education, which leaves many families depending on cheap private schools. Plenty of those schools run out of poorly maintained rented buildings with very little supervision, so the risk lands on the kids from low-income households.

Politics is tangled up in the story too. The school is in a province where Pakistan's president declared a state of emergency on Sunday, saying the provincial government had failed to tackle militancy coming from Afghanistan, which the province denies. The region has long clashed with the federal government, so who gets blamed for the Peshawar school collapse may become its own fight.

What to watch next

After the Peshawar school collapse, expect the probe to focus on three things: whether the building was ever legally approved, whether extra floors or heavy loads were added to the roof, and whether warnings were brushed aside. If investigators find that inspectors signed off on an unsafe structure, officials could face charges alongside the owner. Families will also be watching to see whether the promised compensation actually arrives.

For a generation of students in Pakistan, the point is painfully simple. Going to class should never be a gamble, and parents who scrape together fees for a private school should not have to wonder whether the ceiling will hold. For more on how disasters and policy collide, see our world coverage on GenZ NewZ.