“A mother lost all her four children while many trapped students were heard crying for help under the rubble.”
No fewer than 22 students and teachers were killed while over 132 were injured on Friday when a school in Jos, the capital of Plateau State, collapsed on pupils taking examinations.
Eye witnesses said trapped students were heard crying for help under the rubble after the Saint Academy located in Jos North Local Government Area fell.
As excavators and other mechanical diggers tried to rescue the victims, parents desperately searched for their children.
Although officials have so far only said “several students” were killed, an AFP correspondent reported counting five dead bodies in one hospital morgue and 11 in another with all of them still wearing school uniforms.
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A mother was reported to have lost all her four children to the unfortunate incident that happened when the students were writing the third term examinations.
With his mother at his hospital bedside him, injured student Wulliya Ibrahim told AFP: “I entered the class not more than five minutes, when I heard a sound, and the next thing is I found myself here.
“We are many in the class, we a
were writing our exams,” he said.
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National Emergency Management Agency said the two-story building housing Saint Academy collapsed killing “several students” without giving details.
“NEMA and other critical stakeholders are presently carrying out Search and Rescue operations.”
A resident at the scene, Chika Obioha, told AFP he saw at least eight bodies at the site and that dozens more had been injured.
“Everyone is helping out to see if we can rescue more people,” he said.
The AFP correspondent said he saw 11 bodies in the morgue at the Bingham University Teaching Hospital and five dead taken into the mortuary at the Our Lady of Apostles Hospital in Jos.
Also, no fewer than 15 rescued and injured students were admitted, according to officials at the Our Lady of Apostles Hospital.
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But officials at the Bingham University Teaching Hospital kept sealed lips, refusing to comment.
The cause of the collapse could not be immediately ascertained, but residents said it came after three days of heavy rains in the state.
Building collapses are fairly common in Africa’s most populous nation because of lax enforcement of building standards, negligence and use of low-quality materials. Corruption to bypass official oversight is also often blamed for Nigerian building disasters.
At least 45 people were killed in 2021 when a high-rise building under construction collapsed in the upscale Ikoyi district in Nigeria’s economic capital Lagos.
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Ten people were killed when a three-story building collapsed in the Ebute-Metta area of Lagos the year after.
Since 2005, at least 152 buildings have collapsed in Lagos, according to a South African university researcher investigating construction disasters.
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