Mourners in Lahore buried 14 schoolchildren this week, victims of a roof collapse at a tutoring centre in the Kahna area on the city's southern outskirts, as police widened an investigation into whether negligence by the building's owner and construction workers caused the disaster. The children, aged between 4 and 12, died Tuesday afternoon when the unfinished roof of the building's second floor gave way during lessons; eight more children and a teacher were hospitalized and are in stable condition.
The collapse came without warning in the busiest hour of the teaching day. One father, Muhammad Farooq, described his daughter leaving for tutoring at 4 p.m.; the roof came down around 4:45. Neighbors were the first rescuers, digging children out of the rubble with shovels and bare hands before official teams arrived. Mohammad Ashfaq, a laborer, lost both his seven-year-old son and a nephew.
Police have arrested at least two people, including the building's owner, and senior police official Kamran Faisal said investigators believe poor construction of the second-floor roof — which was being worked on at the time, with laborers repairing roof tiles — likely caused the failure. Preliminary findings indicate the tutoring centre was operating out of an aging, unregistered private house whose structure had visibly deteriorated. Residents have demanded accountability from the owner for holding classes in a building under active construction.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed grief over "the loss of precious lives" and directed authorities to ensure medical care for the injured. Officials promised what one called "a transparent, unbiased and immediate investigation."
The disaster lands on a known fault line in Pakistan's cities. Building and roof collapses are common, the product of poorly enforced construction standards, substandard materials and cost-cutting; a five-storey building collapse in Karachi killed 27 people just last year. Tutoring centres occupy a particular blind spot: a huge after-school industry, often run from converted homes, that operates largely outside any registration or inspection regime.
The Punjab government had, before the collapse, ordered a survey of unsafe buildings ahead of the monsoon season and planned stricter rules for unregistered tutoring centres and other private educational facilities. Those plans are now being tested against the event they were meant to prevent. For the families of Kahna, the reckoning is simpler and has already happened: fourteen small funerals, most of them in the neighborhood, some of the bodies carried back to home villages for burial.