At least 11 people were killed and several others sustained burn injuries as a fire engulfed a shopping mall in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, known for its fragile firefighting system and poor safety controls, officials and rescue members said on Saturday.
The fire erupted in the RJ Shopping Mall building at around 6 in the morning and was finally extinguished after hours of efforts involving eight fire tenders, two snorkels and a water bowser, according to a Fire Department spokesperson. The cooling process had commenced and a search was ongoing for any survivors trapped inside the building on the city’s Rashid Minhas Road.
“Eleven people have died and six others are in critical condition due to smoke and fire in RJ Shopping Mall,” Shahid Hussain, a spokesperson for the Chhipa Welfare Organization that runs a rescue service in the city, said.
Shabbir Ali Babar, a spokesperson for the Sindh provincial health department, confirmed the number of casualties and said the bodies were shifted to Jinnah and Civil hospitals in the city. Sindh Caretaker Chief Minister Maqbool Baqar has directed the local administration to rescue people and provide immediate treatment to the injured.
“Protection of people’s lives is the responsibility of the government,” a statement from his office said.
Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and the main commercial hub, is home to hundreds of thousands of industrial units and some of the tallest buildings in the South Asian country.
But despite its magnitude, the city has only 22 fire stations, a little over a dozen functional fire tenders, few snorkels, and slightly more than a thousand firefighters — woefully inadequate for a megapolis that witnesses hundreds of fire incidents annually.
In April, four firefighters died and nearly a dozen others were injured after a fire broke out in a garment factory, while 10 people were killed in a massive fire at a chemical factory in the city in August 2021.
In the deadliest such incident, 260 people were killed in 2012 after being trapped inside a garment factory when a fire broke out.
