School roof collapses onto classrooms in Peshawar

At least 27 students, most of them younger than 13, were killed when a school roof collapsed during classes at the privately run al-Khair Education Center in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. A teacher also died, and local authorities warned the death toll would rise, with dozens of pupils still unaccounted for as rescuers worked through the rubble.

Television footage showed ambulances racing to the school and rescuers pulling bloodied children from the debris. District emergency officer Iftikhar Khan said at least 45 children had been brought out, with more reported buried. Twenty of the injured were taken to Lady Reading hospital, according to hospital spokesperson Mohammad Asim. A rescue official said the classroom ceiling came down after the roof of a higher floor gave way, crumpling the building's two storeys into one.

Peshawar's police chief, Mian Saeed, supplied the figures behind the warning. Only 47 of the 110 students who were in the three affected classrooms had been rescued, he said, which is why the toll was expected to climb. He was as direct about the cause. "It was a weak building structure," Mian Saeed said. "Its roof was overweight with construction on a weak structure that caused the collapse."

The account places the disaster not in weather or earth but in decisions taken on the building itself: construction loaded onto a roof the structure beneath could not carry, directly above three classrooms holding 110 children. The school is privately run. Its officials had no comment. The state's part in the story so far is the rescue operation, the hospital beds, and an investigation ordered after the fact.

Of the 110 pupils who were in the three classrooms when the ceiling came down, 47 have been rescued and at least 27 are dead. The rest are still under the rubble.