As many as 14 children lost their lives on Tuesday, while several others were injured, when the roof of a private tuition centre collapsed in Lahore’s Kahna area, officials said.
“The children were very young, and there were two rooms in use. The ceilings collapsed and trapped the children,” Rescue 1122 spokesperson Farooq Ahmed told Dawn. Medical sources said the children killed in the collapse were aged between around four and twelve. They had gone to afternoon tuition — the kind of informal coaching centre that operates in converted houses across every Pakistani city.
Deputy Inspector General of Police Operations Faisal Kamran told reporters that the contractor who recently constructed the building had been arrested, saying that part of the building was still under construction, with labourers working at the site when the roof collapsed. The Nation’s confirmed report confirmed the basic facts — 14 dead, the building partially under construction at time of collapse.
That detail is worth pausing on. Children were being taught in a building that was still being built. Labourers were working above while students sat below.
Preliminary information revealed that the roof had been constructed using TR girders — a type of pre-fabricated steel beam commonly used in cheap construction across Pakistan. When overloaded or improperly supported, TR girder roofs fail catastrophically and without warning. A teacher and eight other children were injured and treated at hospital, while police said the owner of the centre and another person had also been arrested. Around 10 injured children remained in critical condition.
A Pattern That Kills Children Every Month
Roof and building collapses are common across Pakistan, mainly due to poor safety standards and the use of substandard construction materials in the South Asian country of more than 240 million people. Al Jazeera’s direct coverage confirmed the broader context. On Monday, two minor sisters died and their cousin was injured when the boundary wall of their house collapsed in Alipur tehsil of Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district. Earlier this month, a roof of an under-construction room collapsed in Faisalabad’s Jaranwala tehsil, killing three members of a family.
Three collapses. Three locations. Three weeks. The pattern is not accidental. It is structural — in every sense of the word.
Pakistan has building codes. It has construction regulations. It has safety inspectors on the payroll. What it does not have is enforcement. A tuition centre operating in a half-finished building with TR girder roofing and children below should never have opened. It did because nobody checked. Lahore Commissioner Marryam Khan said those responsible would be found through “a transparent, unbiased and immediate investigation.”
The contractor has been arrested. The owner has been arrested. But neither arrest rebuilds the thousands of identical structures across Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, and Karachi where children sit under identical roofs right now. The Hania Ahmed case and the Murree expressway tragedy both showed the same pattern: an arrest follows a death, but the systemic failures that caused the death remain untouched.
