By asahifile 
Police in Peshawar have opened a case against the owners, shareholders and construction contractor of Al-Khair school in Dir Colony, the private school where a roof collapsed during morning classes on October 15, killing at least 33 people, almost all of them children, according to hospital officials. The school’s owner, Khan Muhammad, was taken into custody on the day of the collapse, when Peshawar’s police chief Mian Saeed promised a thorough inquiry into “whether there were any violations of building codes.”
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A morning that started like any other
Emergency services were called to the three-storey building at about 08:48 local time, after lessons had begun, Rescue 1122 spokesperson Bilal Faizi told the BBC. The roof of the second-floor nursery classroom went first; the falling rubble smashed through the ground-floor rooms beneath it, and ceilings came down in sequence, trapping children and teachers under the debris. Police chief Saeed later confirmed that classrooms on all three floors were brought down, and estimated the building held roughly 30 pupils in the top-floor class, 40 on the middle floor and 45 on the ground floor. He said the structure’s roof slabs were “substandard” and that the building as a whole was overloaded — carrying more weight than it could bear when the chain reaction started.
The case the police have opened
The FIR was registered at Agha Mir Jani Shah police station under Section 322 of the Pakistan Penal Code — qatl-bis-sabab, death caused without direct intent — together with Sections 148 and 149, which cover being armed with deadly weapons and unlawful assembly. According to the Tribune’s reporting on the FIR, substandard construction materials were used and the building was dilapidated and unsuitable for use as a school; complaints had previously been made about the deteriorating condition of its walls and roofs, and the owners allegedly failed to act on concerns raised by children. The FIR also records a more unusual fact pattern: the 16-marla plot (about 0.5 acres) is owned by two men, Waheed and Javed, who leased it out in 2024, after which the school structure was built. Police said efforts were underway to arrest the remaining nominated suspects.
The casualty counts have shifted between records. Lady Reading Hospital listed 32 children and a 25-year-old female teacher dead among its 53 patients, while Naseerullah Khan Babar Memorial Hospital reported one more child dead. The FIR itself counts 30 children and one female teacher killed and 52 people injured; some later tallies put the death toll at 34. Rescuers pulled more than 40 children alive from the rubble.
The rescue, and the streets that slowed it down
The first responders were neighbors. A teacher from a nearby school said residents rushed in with the ambulances and pulled more than 20 children from the wreckage by hand; another resident described digging with shovels. Emergency official Arif Khattak said the building had been constructed as a temporary structure, and a rescue official said the collapsed roof was a traditional mix of mud and bricks — heavy, and likely to suffocate anyone beneath it rather than leave air pockets. The school sits on a narrow street in a densely packed neighborhood, which made it hard for heavy rescue machinery to reach the site and slowed transport of victims to hospitals. Police have since locked the school and warned the building remains “extremely dangerous” with a risk of further collapse.
A province that has seen this before
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s government ordered a fact-finding inquiry within a day of the collapse and directed a structural safety audit of educational institutions across the province; the provincial education department has recommended a survey of government school buildings that classifies them by structural risk. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised a thorough investigation. The urgency is not abstract: on June 30, 2026, 14 children were killed when the roof of a private tuition center collapsed in Lahore’s Kahna area, another case of students crushed under an aging, cheaply built roof. The pattern under scrutiny now is familiar to Pakistan’s education sector — private schools operating in unregulated or thinly inspected buildings where the people raising alarms are children who know the walls are cracking.
What to watch
- Whether the shareholders and contractor named in the FIR are arrested alongside the owner.
- Findings of the fact-finding inquiry and district- and province-wide structural audit.
- How the reconciled death toll settles once hospital and FIR figures are matched.
- Any new regulation for private school buildings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and whether the summer’s Lahore case and this one produce enforcement.
Sources: BBC, Express Tribune, Arab News, AP.