Grieving families seek solace

ISLAMABAD:

When 7-year-old Rumaisa Khan set off for school on Thursday she was wearing a brand-new pair of shoes her father had just bought for her.

Within hours she was dead, one of 35 students killed when the roof of her school collapsed in Peshawar. "I had got her a pair of new shoes which she wore that day after gifting the old one to a cousin," her father, garment shopowner Ismail Khan, said on Friday as the community mourned the victims of the tragedy.

He and his brother had pulled Rumaisa from the rubble of the Al-Khair Education Center, located in narrow alleys on the city outskirts. They rushed her to a hospital where she was declared dead. "She left us too early," he said.

School bags, books and broken furniture were scattered across the site where the roof came down on nearly 110 students taking lessons in three classes. A total of 35 students, all below the age of 13, and two female teacher were killed.

"We never imagined that sending him to school would end in such a tragedy. We had trusted that the school was a place where he could learn, grow, and fulfil his ambitions," his brother Mohammad Haroon told Reuters at their home in a densely populated area close to the school.

They were seven siblings, Amir, 13, being the youngest and Haroon, 24, the eldest. Haroon had joined the residents and rescuers to pull the children from the rubble, which took hours.

Maulana Zakirullah, 38, a prayer leader at a mosque, lost his two sons, Mohammad, 10, and Abu Bakar, 8. "The scene that confronted us when we arrived was devastating. Children were buried beneath the rubble, and it was difficult to see anything clearly," Zakirullah said.

He said he was asleep when his children had left for school. "I did not see them off," he said, adding that he only saw both his sons in coffins at a hospital several hours later.