PESHAWAR: Grief continues to grip Peshawar days after the roof of a private school collapsed during morning classes on Thursday, 15 October 2026, killing dozens of children and a teacher in one of the deadliest building collapses in the country’s recent history.
The collapse took place at the Al-Khair Education Centre in the Dir Colony area of the city at about 8:48 in the morning. According to police and hospital officials, a roof on an upper floor gave way and fell through the building, trapping students in classrooms below. Rescue 1122 teams, police, local residents and volunteers worked for four to five hours to pull children from the rubble, while ambulances carried the injured to Lady Reading Hospital and Naseerullah Khan Babar Memorial Hospital through the area’s narrow streets.
Hospital and police counts were updated several times as casualty lists were verified. Dawn reported an official Lady Reading Hospital list recording 30 students and a female teacher killed and 61 people brought to that hospital, while international wire reports put the number of children killed higher, at 34, with more than 50 people injured in total. Most of the children who died were aged 14 or younger, and a small number of critically injured children, including some with head injuries, remained under treatment after most of the injured were discharged following first aid.
Peshawar Capital City Police chief Dr Mian Saeed said the three-storey building was weakly constructed and its roof had been overloaded, and confirmed that the school’s owner had been taken into custody. Deputy Commissioner Afaq Wazir ordered an inquiry, and the provincial education authorities directed the Private Schools Regulatory Authority to report on the school’s registration and inspection history. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi directed departments to enforce safety rules for private schools strictly and asked for new legislation to be prepared within 15 days.
In the days following the tragedy, both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab moved to act on unsafe school buildings. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Department ordered district officers and school heads to identify dangerous and dilapidated buildings, suspend teaching in them immediately and arrange alternative places for students, with structural surveys to be carried out by Communication and Works Department engineers. Education department sources said nearly 37,000 classrooms in government schools across the province were in dilapidated condition, including more than 19,000 needing reconstruction. Punjab’s Directorate of Public Instruction likewise banned educational activities in dangerous school buildings and dilapidated classrooms across that province, warning that school heads, owners and operators would be held responsible for negligence and that no unsafe classroom could be reused without clearance from the authorised technical body.
For the families of Dir Colony, official findings and promised reforms will come after funerals and burials. Residents and parents have demanded that responsibility for the collapse be fixed through a transparent investigation and that safety inspections of private schools operating in converted or purpose-built buildings in congested neighbourhoods be carried out regularly, not only after a disaster.
Watch the related video on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reel/869744529494558/
