Peshawar school roof collapse kills five children of same family

A family was mourning the deaths of five children Friday after the roof of their school collapsed in Peshawar, killing 35 people and forcing authorities to urge safety inspections across the region.

The victims included 11-year olds Mubasshir Naeem and Sanan Asad, seven-year olds Amir Mangal and Haleema Haleem and eight-year old Romaisa Ismail, among 34 children murdered after the roof of their private school fell in Peshawar’s Dir Colony on Thursday. Also killed was a teacher.

“It is all quiet around,” Tausif Uddin, an uncle of the five children, told Arab News as visitors flocked to the family’s hujra, a traditional guest room, to offer condolences on Friday afternoon.

“When I was lying down at nite, I opened the window and it was completely silent. “The whole neighborhood has been silent since yesterday.”

Uddin said he was at home Thursday morning when some youngsters unexpectedly came home from school with their clothes muddy.

“It was 8:30 in the morning and I was at home. At about 8:45 a.m. there was a knock on the door. “The children don’t come home at this time,” he told his wife.

“When I saw them through the window they were mucky. I asked them what happened and they informed me the roof had collapsed.

The family rushed to the school without pausing to put on their shoes.

“Then we didn’t look at nothing’. We didn’t even have slippers on our feet to run to the school. “When we got there, it was like doomsday,” Uddin added.

“We pulled the children out of the rubble by hand. They died in torment.”

“We just can’t comprehend the scale of the disaster as the news of the collapse is spreading,” said another uncle, Zubair Khan.

“We didn’t know what happened, what was going on, for up to an hour,” he added. “The mind could not understand it at first. Then we went and witnessed the situation and [heard that] children died.”

The most painful recollections for Khan were within the family home, where the normal talks and routines of the children were suddenly absent.

“The children who would laugh and scream, saying We need this thing, I am going to school tomorrow, it is late, and this and that. “They’re not living any more,” he added. Their voices, their discourse, are gone forever.

The proprietor of the school has been arrested by police and a commission has been set up by the provincial administration to investigate the disaster.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa council’s education adviser Dr Syed Amir Abdullah said the authorities have begun a province-wide evaluation of school buildings’ safety.