The roof of a private school in Peshawar collapsed on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, killing at least 35 people — 34 children and a teacher — and injuring more than 50 others.
Some of the children trapped beneath the rubble of the Al-Khair school in northwestern Pakistan died of suffocation, police said. Authorities and a hospital official called it the deadliest incident of its kind in the country.
Emergency services spokesperson Bilal Faizi said the roofs of two classrooms gave way. Second- and third-grade children were inside with their teachers at the time, Faizi said.
Lady Reading Hospital spokesman Mohammad Asim said the children killed or hurt were aged between six and 12, and that the oldest victim was 14. The state-run hospital declared an emergency, and several of the wounded remain in critical condition, he said.
Rescuers Reached the School in Minutes
Ambulances and disaster management personnel from a nearby facility arrived within five minutes of the alert, and nearly 100 rescuers eventually joined the operation. Panicked, grieving parents were already trying to help before crews arrived.
Faizi credited the rapid evacuation with saving at least 40 lives. More than a dozen children escaped with minor injuries, he said, and within hours rescuers had pulled out everyone trapped and cleared the debris.
Neighbors in the congested central Peshawar district reached the scene before many others, according to witnesses. Zahir Hussain, a resident whose home sits a couple of blocks from the school, was on his way to work when people began running into the street, he told CBS News, and the first-period lesson had barely begun.
“The building was not suitable for use as a school at all,” Hussain said, adding that the street outside was so narrow it slowed rescue teams.
Samiullah Khan, another resident, rushed to the building and helped pull out three girls. His son, a student there, survived because he had left the classroom for a drink of water.
Police Point to a Choka Roof
Police said the collapsed roof was a traditional structure of mud and bricks, and that the slab had been built using choka — thin, flat clay tiles or custom-tapered bricks. The structure appeared overloaded, police said.
Peshawar police chief Saeed Ahmed said officers arrested the school’s owner, Mohammad Khan, and described the three-story building as structurally weak. After his arrest, the owner blamed rainfall for weakening one of the roofs, police said.
The investigation is still underway, police cautioned. Ahmed said a case will be registered and investigators will determine which building regulations were violated. The building remains in danger of further collapse, and rescue teams moved people out immediately, police said.
Five Children From One Family
Relatives said they had warned the school’s owner before the collapse. Mohammad Zaman, 36, whose nephews Abdul, nine, and Abuzar, 10, died, said families complained repeatedly that rainwater was seeping into classrooms and warned that the building’s condition could lead to a tragedy.
Abuzar’s sister Samiya, a nursery student, survived. She had gone outside to buy sweets.
Zakir Ullah lost both of his sons, Abu Bakr and Mohammad, who were in the same classroom. “How could I have known this would take both my sons away from me?” he said. He described the building as weak and demanded punishment for any officials who authorized its use as a school.
One family lost five children: 11-year-olds Mubasshir Naeem and Sanan Asad, seven-year-olds Amir Mangal and Haleema Haleem, and eight-year-old Romaisa Ismail. Their uncle, Tausif Uddin, told Arab News on Friday, Oct. 16: “We pulled the children out of the debris with our hands. They died in pain.”
Mosque loudspeakers carried announcements urging mass funeral prayers at the nearby Rehman Baba cemetery. Most of the children who died came from Dir Colony, the neighborhood around the school, residents said, and families were unsure which bereaved household to visit first. Ambulances carried the children’s bodies from the hospital back to their homes as mourners wept.
Mahwish Zaman, a teacher injured in the collapse, spoke from her hospital bed. She said the school enrolled roughly 1,200 students from nursery through fifth grade, and that she was in her classroom when the roof came down. It was as though the sky had fallen, she said, and she regained consciousness in the hospital.
Officials said about 300 students were believed to be studying in the three-story building, with around 100 in the three classrooms damaged.
Province Orders Audit of Every School
Gov. Faisal Karim Kundi of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa toured the site, asked for a report on what caused the collapse and instructed staff to give the injured children the best possible care. A structural safety audit of every government and private educational institution in the province will follow on his orders, with findings due within one week; the inquiry into the collapse, he said, would finish within four days. No school audit had been carried out before because of negligence by the previous provincial government, the governor said.
A fact-finding committee has been constituted by the provincial Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which ordered the panel to report urgently. Its chair is Javed Iqbal, managing director of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Private Schools Regulatory Authority, and Muhammad Farooq, deputy secretary for primary education, serves as a member. The panel will nominate its third member and recommend measures to prevent similar disasters.
As of Oct. 17, the education department had been ordered to set up district committees to inspect every private school building in the province, both owned and rented, under a directive from Syed Aamir Abdullah, a member of the provincial advisory council for education. The committees’ findings and recommendations are due within three days, the checks cover roofs, ceilings, walls, columns, beams, foundations and staircases, and buildings will be classified as safe, needing repairs, or potentially unsafe.
Provincial government spokesperson Samar Haroon Bilour appealed to parents on Friday, Oct. 16, in a video message, for information about schools housed in structurally weak buildings. The government is also conducting inspections, she said.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif sent condolences from Islamabad and called for a comprehensive investigation, saying school buildings must meet safety standards. “The entire nation shares the grief of the affected families in this hour of sorrow,” Zardari said.
Pakistan sees frequent building collapses, as construction standards go poorly enforced, many structures rely on substandard materials and safety rules are routinely ignored to cut costs. A tutoring center under construction in Lahore lost its roof in July, killing 14 schoolchildren, with police attributing the collapse to poor construction quality and the fall of an unfinished upper floor.