KARACHI, Jan 19 — Pakistani firefighters began searching the smouldering remains of a sprawling Karachi shopping mall on Monday for more than 60 people still missing after a massive fire that killed at least 15 people.
The fire started late on Saturday at Gul Plaza, which houses 1,200 shops in a multi-storey complex spread across an area larger than a football field. The blaze in Karachi’s historic centre raged for more than 24 hours before it was mostly extinguished, although officials said small flames were still breaking out among the ruins.
Videos showed flames ripping through the building as firefighters laboured through the night to put out the blaze. On Monday, they began cooling the structure and clearing twisted metal and debris strewn across the street, along with fallen air-conditioning units and shop signboards.
Most of the building had collapsed by Monday afternoon, with cranes surrounding the remaining structure amid fears it might collapse.
Qasir Khan said his wife, daughter-in-law and her mother had gone to the mall on Saturday evening and were among those still missing.
“The bodies will come out in pieces from here. No one will be able to recognise them,” Khan said, blaming the rescue effort for not being swift enough. “They could have saved a lot of people.”
Hundreds of people surrounded the building as rescue teams searched for survivors, including shopowners whose life’s work was reduced to ash overnight.
“We’ve been left high and dry, reduced to zero; 20 years of hard work, all gone,” said shopowner Yasmeen Bano. Murad Ali Shah, the chief minister of the southern Sindh province that includes Karachi, said 15 people had been killed, including a firefighter, and 65 were still missing. He added that 80 people were injured in the blaze with 22 already released from hospital.
“We are trying our best that we make the missing persons accounted for. That’s our priority right now,” he said at a press conference.
Anger was bubbling when Karachi’s Mayor Murtaza Wahab visited the site on Sunday night after 23 hours, with people chanting anti-government slogans and protesting about the response time from the fire department, local media reported.
Kosar Bano said six of her family members had gone to the mall to shop for a wedding. The last time she heard from them they said they would be home in 15 minutes.
“The only hope we have is how many hands we will find, how many fingers we will find, and how many legs we will find. That’s it,” she said.
“Do you see any hope here!”
‘Heads will roll’
According to rescue services, authorities received the first emergency call at 10.38pm on Saturday, reporting that ground-floor shops were on fire. By the time firefighters arrived, the flames had already spread to the upper floors, engulfing much of the building.
Images of the mall’s interior revealed the charred remains of stores and a bright orange glow as flames continued to rise throughout the building.
Firefighters said Gul Plaza’s lack of ventilation caused thick smoke to fill the building and slowed efforts to reach people trapped inside.
Shah said the government would launch an inquiry into the cause of the fire and whether there were any mistakes in the rescue efforts.
“I’m admitting that there are faults. I can’t say whose fault is this. An inquiry will be conducted and heads will roll,” he said. “It appears to have been caused by a circuit breaker,” police chief Javed Alam Odho told reporters on Sunday.
“The layout and construction of this market was such, and secondly, the nature of the items in it - such as carpets, blankets and other objects made of resins - so the fire is still simmering because of these.”
However, Shah said the cause of the fire was still unknown. The blaze at Gul Plaza could be Karachi’s biggest fire since an industrial site went up in flames in 2012, killing more than 260 people. A court ruled in 2020 that the disaster involved arson. — Reuters
