Peshawar school collapse: tolls range 28 to 35 as police allege an overloaded roof, Rescue 1122 blames rain

Full analysis

The roof failed at 8:48 on a Thursday morning. In Dir Colony, a congested inner-city quarter of Peshawar, the privately run Al-Khair school was in session when an upper-floor roof gave way and brought the classrooms beneath it down. The mechanism, as described by Rescue 1122 spokesman Bilal Ahmed Faizi to AFP and echoed by The National’s own rescue sources, was one roof collapsing onto another, crushing the classroom below with the children inside. An official quoted by Pakistan’s Daily Pakistan gave the sequence more precisely: the roof of a first-floor classroom collapsed first, followed by the ground-floor roof beneath it.

What cannot yet be settled is how many people that roof killed. The tolls published Thursday range from 28 to 35, and they are best understood not as disagreement but as the arithmetic being frozen at successive hours of the same rescue. The earliest figures cluster low: Semana, the Colombian magazine running AFP’s copy, reported 27 students and a teacher dead, citing Lady Reading Hospital’s Asim Khan, while Daily Pakistan put the toll at 29 — 27 students and two female teachers — at a moment when the hospital itself had received only 22 bodies, 21 children and one female teacher. By the time Xinhua’s French service published the hospital’s bed-management report, the count had hardened: 53 patients brought in, 33 of them dead, 17 sent home after observation and three still under watch, with victims aged 4 to 14 plus a 25-year-old woman. The National’s body text matches that 33 — 32 pupils and a teacher — even as its own headline says 27 children. The highest number, 35, came through the Press Trust of India’s dispatch in the Hindustan Times: 34 children and a teacher. That figure resolves cleanly when the hospitals are separated. PTI’s hospital spokesman counted 32 children and a teacher brought dead to Lady Reading, then added two more children’s bodies carried to the Naseerullah Khan Babar Memorial Hospital. The gap between 33 and 35, in other words, is exactly the two bodies only PTI counted at the second hospital. The climb from the 28-29 cluster to 33 is the difference between the hospital’s first confirmed bodies and its final tally. The numbers do not contradict one another; they are snapshots of a still-moving rescue, taken from different doorways.

The rescue itself was substantial and slow. Faizi told AFP that 16 ambulances and more than 60 rescuers were deployed; The National records that the operation ran four to five hours, with workers pulling children from the rubble while parents pressed against the building. The Hindustan Times adds that Pakistan Army personnel joined the effort, that police established a green corridor through Peshawar to keep ambulances moving, and that the school sat in narrow streets that made the dig harder. By afternoon the deputy commissioner, Afaq Wazir, said everyone trapped beneath the debris had been recovered.

The deeper split is over why the roof fell, and it decides whether anyone goes to prison. Peshawar’s police chief, Mian Saeed, went on record to both PTI and The National — two independent reporting chains — with the same account: the roof was poorly constructed, and construction material piled on top of a weak structure overloaded it. “It was a weak building structure,” he told The National. “Its roof was overloaded with construction on a weak structure, which caused the collapse.” The owner, who ran the school as an education trust, has been arrested, Saeed said; that detail is the one fact in this story that two separate chains of reporting carry identically. Pakistan’s own emergency service tells a different story. Rescue 1122 spokesman Bilal Ahmed Faizi told Xinhua that police are investigating but that preliminary findings point to heavy rain bringing down the two-storey building, and an unnamed official gave Daily Pakistan the same account, attributing the weakening of the roofs to recent rainfall. A neighbor in Dir Colony told AFP — carried by Semana — that the cause was poor-quality construction materials and demanded an investigation. Only one of these causal stories can survive the inquiry committee the deputy commissioner has now constituted.

Even the building itself disagrees in the telling. The PTI dispatch describes three storeys; Xinhua’s is two, with the other accounts of the upper roof falling through to the floors below sitting between them. More consequential is who was inside. Police counted 30 students in the upper-floor classrooms, according to the Hindustan Times. Arif Khattak, regional director of the Rescue Department, told The National that 110 students were attending lessons in three classrooms when the roof caved in. On the day, the state could not agree on what its own school contained.

The National alone records what families want done about it. Mohammad Zaman, who lost two nephews, told the paper: “Make an example of them, a lesson for all, so that no one dares open a school just to make money without providing facilities.” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised a thorough investigation and said no parent should have to endure such pain, while President Asif Ali Zardari called it a heart-wrenching tragedy and asked for a comprehensive inquiry into building safety standards. The provincial education secretary ordered the Private Schools Regulatory Authority to submit its report by Friday.

What a reader takes away depends sharply on which country’s press they happened to open. A reader of only Daily Pakistan, the sole domestic Pakistani outlet in the set, would conclude that rain weakened the roofs and killed 29 people, and would never learn that a man is in custody on a negligence theory — the article carries no arrest and no police causal claim. A reader of only India’s Hindustan Times would get the negligence account and the arrest in fullest form, the highest toll, and a grim recent history of school collapses, but would never hear Rescue 1122’s rain explanation, the official position of Pakistan’s own emergency service, nor that 110 children may have been inside. A reader of only Xinhua would hold the most precise hospital arithmetic and the rain cause, and would not know anyone had been arrested. A reader of only The National would get the fullest scene — the 110 students, the uncle’s demand, the rescue timeline — but its headline of 27 children understates its own body’s 33 dead, and a reader of the headline alone would leave carrying the lowest count in the set. A reader of only Semana would get AFP’s roof-on-roof mechanism and a neighbor blaming materials, with no arrest and no named state official’s account of the cause. None of the five outlets alone contains the story.

Which account is closest to right? The police’s, and not only because a man is in custody. The arrest is a concrete act, carried on the record by a named officer to two separate reporting chains, and an arrest presupposes something the police believe they can stand up. The rain theory is hedged as preliminary, rests on an unnamed official in the Daily Pakistan account, and answers the wrong question: rain fell on every roof in Peshawar that morning without bringing them down, so the relevant fact is what was already on top of this one. The neighbor’s materials complaint runs in the negligence direction, and so does the pattern that both PTI and AFP lay out — 14 children killed in a Lahore tuition-centre collapse in June, three girls crushed by a school wall in Sindh in July, 27 dead in a Karachi building in 2025. Rain may have been the trigger on the day; overloaded construction on a weak roof is the structure the deputy commissioner’s committee will now examine.