Uzair Mohammed Qureshi, a 17-year-old student at a private school, was reading his chemistry book in the classroom when the school building suddenly began to shake. Seconds later, the roof caved in.
About 15 to 20 students were in the room when the massive quake struck on Saturday across a swath of northern Pakistan and the mountainous region of Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan.
Thousands died in what Pakistan called its worst-ever disaster, and India reported several hundred deaths. Reports were emerging yesterday of village after village where school buildings collapsed on top of students, killing hundreds.
School in session
The quake struck shortly before 9am, a time when schools were already in session. It nearly wiped out school populations in Balakot, a town of 30,000 about 100km north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
"My teacher had just left the classroom after finishing his lecture and I was reading a book when suddenly we felt a shock," Qureshi said yesterday. "Then, came another jolt and we ran toward the door to save our lives, but suddenly the roof collapsed."
"For minutes I thought I have died," he said. "But after gaining consciousness, I looked around and saw a friend of mine lying near me."
Qureshi's hands suffered deep cuts when hit by falling debris, but he climbed through a hole in the wall to safety and dragged his friend behind him. He said he believed the other students in his class were critically injured or killed.
The teenager's ordeal was not over. He rushed home, but found only a pile of rubble. His parents and grandmother were dead.
`I wish I had died'
"Some people in our area helped me pull out the bodies of my mother and grandmother, but my father's body is still trapped in the rubble," he said. "I wish I had died and my father had survived."
A day after the disaster, he sat on the rubble of his school building, still in his school uniform because he had lost all his possessions.
"There is nobody who can help me save my class fellows," he said. "Is there anybody who can help me?"
RSS