A school in the Sirikot village of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Haripur district caught fire on Monday morning, although no casualties were recorded, according to DawnNewsTV. When the fire broke out, about a thousand female students were inside the Government Girls’ High Secondary School Sirikot, according to Dawn.com’s local correspondent. The fire had burned for more than two hours before being put out by fire and rescue personnel who had arrived there in a fire brigade van, the correspondent reported. He said that the Ghazi and Haripur Tehsil Municipal Administrations (TMAs) had also been called, but their vehicles had not yet arrived at the location.
The cause of the incident has not been officially stated, although Rashid, the father of a student enrolled there, stated that his daughter was inside the classroom when the fire started and that sparks from the roof may have caused it to ignite, suggesting that a short circuit could have been the cause. According to the correspondent for Dawn.com, the fire soon spread throughout the structure, destroying the school’s furnishings and paper records as well as the building itself. Videos taken from the scene with mobile phones revealed massive clouds of smoke rising out of the school and roof debris falling while the fire inside raged. There were also several people gathered outside the school.
After learning of the occurrence, KP Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur directed the district administration and provincial education department to investigate the fire’s cause and provide a report. According to his office’s statement, he also ordered that any damages done to the school building should be repaired right away to resume academic operations. In the last few years, Haripur has had several fire events. In December, a cattle corral in Khanpur tehsil of Haripur caught fire, killing eight animals and leaving a woman dead. Large-scale wildfires destroyed hundreds of acres of forest in Haripur and three other KP districts during the summer of 2022.
