• Gather outside building to mourn children who perished in incident
• Police chief says roof was ‘overloaded’ with construction on ‘weak structure’

PESHAWAR: Families of children killed in a school roof collapse in Peshawar’s Dir Colony called for “justice” on Friday, a day after more than 30 people, including students and a female teacher, died in the incident.

“The parents of all these children must receive justice,” tailor Muhammad Wahab, who lost his 11-year-old nephew Hammad in the incident, told AFP.

“I appeal to our rulers,” he said, adding that Hammad had been “doing well in school” before the tragedy.

Dozens of people gathered outside the school on Friday to mourn the children killed in the collapse, which officials blamed on dilapidated infrastructure.

One grief-stricken father showed AFP a picture on his mobile phone of his young daughter, dressed in red and gold, who died in the incident.

Another parent, Asadullah, said he had lost a son, a nephew and three other close relatives in the tragedy.

“The children were good students and often achieved top positions in their classes,” he told AFP. “They happily went to school every day.”

Residents and rescuers described chaotic scenes in the aftermath of Thursday’s collapse, as people scrambled to pull children from beneath the rubble.

A man named Sohail told AFP that “everyone began screaming in panic” when his niece, who had escaped the building, arrived home and told them it had collapsed.

“When I arrived at the scene, I saw around 10 to 15 children trapped beneath the rubble, with debris piled up to their necks. We quickly pulled them out,” he said.

Another victim, 13-year-old Mohammad Amir, had dreamed of becoming a religious scholar, his family said.

“We never imagined that sending him to school would end in such a tragedy. We had trusted that the school was a place where he could learn, grow, and fulfil his ambitions,” his brother Mohammad Haroon told Reuters.

They were seven siblings, Amir, 13, being the youngest and Haroon, 24, the eldest.

Haroon had joined the residents and rescuers to pull the children from the rubble, which took hours.

Maulana Zakirullah, 38, a prayer leader at a mosque, lost his two sons, Mohammad, 10, and Abu Bakar, 8.

“The scene that confronted us when we arrived was devastating.

Children were buried beneath the rubble, and it was difficult to see anything clearly,” Zakirullah said.

He said he was asleep when his children had left for school.

“I did not see them off,” he said, adding that he only saw both his sons in coffins at a hospital several hours later.

Soon after the incident, the provincial chief secretary on Thursday constituted a fact-finding committee to investigate the collapse and directed it to submit a report within seven days.

Images released by emergency services showed rescue workers in high-visibility vests scrambling to move debris, rubble and dirt.

‘Weak infrastructure’

A senior official in Peshawar told AFP that initial reports suggested the roof collapse was due to “weak infrastructure”. The school owner has been detained.

Peshawar police chief Mian Saeed said the school’s roof was overloaded with construction on a weak structure, which caused the collapse.

Building and roof collapses are common in Pakistan, often attributed to poor safety standards and the use of substandard construction materials.

In June, more than a dozen children were killed when a roof collapsed at a tutoring centre in Lahore.

In 2025, 27 people were killed and 10 injured when a five-storey building collapsed in the Lyari area of Karachi.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2026