At least 27 pupils and a teacher have been killed after a school roof collapsed in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, according to hospital officials.
More than a dozen others are injured, with some in a critical condition. Several children are feared trapped under the rubble.
Emergency services were alerted to the incident at the private Al-Khair school in Dir Colony at 08:48 (03:48 GMT) on Thursday after lessons had begun, a rescue official said.
He told the BBC the roof of a first-floor classroom had collapsed onto a ground-floor classroom below, causing its ceiling to cave in as well.
“The children in the affected classroom were trapped under the debris,” the official, Bilal Faizi, said.
The school is located in a building that had been constructed on a temporary basis, with two and three-storey portions, according to emergency official Arif Khattak.
The affected classrooms were in the two-storey part of the building, which did not appear to have a conventional reinforced concrete roof. Instead, it had prefabricated roofing slabs.
Based on the condition of the debris, it appears that when the roof of the upper-floor classroom collapsed, the falling rubble crashed through into the classroom below, burying another group of children under the debris.
The Al-Khair school is in a narrow street on which only one vehicle can pass at a time – meaning it was difficult for rescue workers to reach the site and transport the injured to Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital.
Sohail, a local resident, said his sister had called him at 09:30 urging him to come to the school, where she said young children were trapped.
“I and other residents of the area rushed to the scene and tried to pull them out using shovels,” he told BBC Urdu.
The school’s owner has been arrested, the city’s police chief confirmed, and the governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has ordered a safety audit of all schools in the province to “identify potential risks and ensure that immediate corrective measures are taken wherever necessary”.
“We cannot allow the safety of our children to be compromised,” said Governor Faisal Karim Kundi.
Four months ago, fourteen children died after the roof of a private tuition centre near Lahorecollapsed.
And in August, 14 newborn babies were killed by a fire that ripped through a neonatal unit at a hospital in the capital Islamabad, which an inquiry found lacked fire alarms and sprinklers.
By BBC News
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