PESHAWAR — A family in Peshawar was mourning the deaths of five children on Friday, a day after the roof of their private school collapsed in the city’s Dir Colony, killing 35 people and prompting authorities to order safety inspections across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The five children — 11-year-olds Mubasshir Naeem and Sanan Asad, seven-year-olds Amir Mangal and Haleema Haleem, and eight-year-old Romaisa Ismail — were among 34 children killed in Thursday’s collapse. A teacher also died in the disaster.
A Neighborhood Falls Silent
“There is silence all around,” Tausif Uddin, an uncle of the five children, told Arab News as visitors gathered at the family’s hujra, a traditional guest room, to offer condolences on Friday afternoon.
“At night, when I was lying down, I opened the window and there was utter silence. The whole neighborhood has been silent since yesterday.”
Uddin recalled being at home on Thursday morning when some children unexpectedly returned from school, their clothes covered in mud.
“It was 8:30 am and I was at home. Around 8:45 am, there was a knock on the door. I told my wife that the children don’t come home at this time,” he said.
“When I saw them through the window, they were covered in mud. I asked them what had happened, and they told me that the roof had collapsed.”
‘Like Doomsday’
The family rushed to the school without stopping to put on their shoes.
“Then we didn’t look at anything. We didn’t even have slippers on our feet as we ran to the school. When we reached it, it was like doomsday,” Uddin said.
“We pulled the children out of the debris with our hands. They died in pain.”
Another uncle, Zubair Khan, said the family struggled to comprehend the scale of the disaster as news of the collapse spread.
“For up to an hour, we didn’t know what had happened or what the situation was,” he said. “At first, the mind couldn’t comprehend it. Then we went, saw the situation and learned that the children had died.”
For Khan, the most painful reminders were inside the family home, where the children’s everyday conversations and routines had suddenly disappeared.
“The children who would laugh and scream, who would say ‘We need this thing,’ ‘I am going to school tomorrow,’ ‘It is late,’ and this and that. They are no longer alive,” he said. “Their voices and their talk have ended forever.”
Owner Arrested as Safety Review Launched
Police have arrested the school’s owner, and the provincial government has formed a committee to investigate the collapse.
Dr Syed Amir Abdullah, an education adviser to the newly formed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa council, said authorities had launched a province-wide review of school building safety.
The tragedy has renewed concerns about construction standards at private schools across the region, where enforcement of building regulations has long been questioned.
