(Jos) At least 16 students were killed in central Nigeria on Friday and others were screaming for help under the rubble after their school building where exams were being held collapsed.
Excavators were working to rescue victims trapped under the rubble as parents desperately searched for their children, an AFP journalist saw. Authorities in Jos, the Plateau state capital, have so far said “several students” have been killed in the partial collapse of the Saint Academy school, in classrooms.
An AFP journalist saw five bodies in one hospital morgue and 11 in another. All were wearing school uniforms.
“I entered the classroom and just five minutes later I heard a noise, and then I found myself here,” Wulliya Ibrahim, one of the injured students, told AFP with his mother next to his hospital bed. “There are many of us in the classroom, we are taking our exams,” he said.
The National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, had earlier said that a “two-storey building housing the Holy Academy […] to Busa Buji […] collapsed this morning, killing several students,” adding that rescue operations had been deployed.
“Save more”
A resident, Chika Obioha, said he saw at least eight bodies at the scene and many injured people.
“Everyone is trying to see how to save more people,” he said. The AFP correspondent said he saw 11 bodies at the Bingham University Teaching Hospital morgue and five others taken to the Our Lady of the Apostles Hospital morgue in Jos.
At least 15 rescued and injured students were hospitalized, hospital officials said. Officials at Bingham University Hospital declined to comment. The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, but residents said it occurred after three days of heavy rain.
Building collapses are quite common in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, due to lax enforcement of building standards, negligence and the use of poor quality materials. At least 45 people were killed in 2021 when a building under construction collapsed in the upscale Ikoyi area of Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital.
Ten people were killed the following year when a three-story building collapsed in the Ebute-Metta area of Lagos. Since 2005, at least 152 buildings have collapsed in Lagos, according to a South African university researcher investigating construction disasters.