Police in Peshawar have registered a criminal case against the owners, shareholders and the construction contractor of the Al-Khair school in Dir Colony, a day after its roof gave way during morning classes. The first information report, lodged at the Agha Mir Jani Shah police station on behalf of the state, records the deaths of 30 children and a female teacher and injuries to 52 people, and alleges substandard construction in a building the FIR calls unfit for use as a school. The move shifts the roof collapse that put KP’s governor’s-rule setup to its first safety test into a formal accountability track, one that now runs through the courts rather than the rescue operation.
Who the FIR names and the law it invokes
The case is registered under Section 322 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which deals with qatl-bis-sabab, death caused without an intention to kill, according to Geo News. ARY News reports the FIR also cites Sections 148 and 149 of the PPC. The nominated suspects are the school’s owners, its shareholders and the contractor responsible for the building’s construction. Police say efforts are underway to arrest the suspects named in the report.
The warnings the FIR says were ignored
The FIR’s most serious allegation is not only about how the building was constructed but about how long its condition was known. It states that complaints had earlier been lodged about the deteriorating walls and roofs, and that the school owners did not act on them even after children themselves raised concerns about the building. The report says the roofs of a nursery classroom on the second floor and several rooms on the ground floor collapsed. According to the FIR, the school stood on a 16-marla plot owned by two men, Waheed and Javed, leased in 2024 and built on afterwards.
Registered in March, never properly inspected
Here the regulatory failure enters the frame. Dawn’s editorial on the tragedy notes that Al-Khair was registered by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa private schools regulator in March this year, yet technical personnel were absent from its inspection. That single gap, registration without structural scrutiny, is what turned a private building into a state-recognised school while its bricks were already suspect. Dawn also points to the pattern: a tuition centre roof collapse in Lahore’s Kahna area and a school roof collapse in Baghbanpura earlier this year, both with child deaths.
Three days to inspect every private school in KP
The provincial Elementary and Secondary Education Department has now issued a notification forming district-level committees to survey and physically inspect private school buildings across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Headed by district monitoring officers and including education and communication-and-works officials, the committees must identify structural defects and safety hazards and file their reports within three days, classifying each building as safe, in need of repairs or unsafe. The order came as parliament’s joint sitting ratified the KP emergency 240-46, and as the federal committee under Ishaq Dar monitoring KP affairs under governor’s rule began its oversight work, meaning the first real test of the new setup is a safety question, not a political one.
What happens next
The owner is already in custody, detained a day earlier when the collapse was still being treated as a rescue emergency, and police say the remaining nominated suspects are being traced. The investigation still has to answer how the school obtained permission to operate and whether it held a valid no-objection certificate, questions a police official said would be examined. The FIR is only the opening step: the case now moves from the police file to the prosecution, where the negligence allegations will have to be proved in court. For the families of the 30 children and the teacher, that process is the only route left from grief to accountability. For the province’s schools, the three-day inspection is the first attempt to make sure the next weak roof is caught before it needs a rescue operation to be noticed.
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