KARACHI, Jan 18 (Reuters) – A fire broke out at a shopping mall in Karachi’s historic downtown district on Sunday, killing six people and reducing parts of the building to rubble as firefighters searched for more than 65 missing people.
Video showed firefighters working through the night to stop a blaze that started Saturday night from spreading through the densely populated business district, with flames rising from the building. After 24 hours of fighting, firefighters began cooling the steaming rubble of the nearly collapsed building.
Firefighters told local Pakistani television station Geo News that poor ventilation in the mall, which houses more than 1,200 stores, caused the building to fill with smoke, slowing rescue efforts.
“It appears to have been caused by a circuit breaker,” Sindh provincial police chief Javed Alam Odo told reporters at the scene, Dawn News reported.
“The layout and construction of this market is what it is, and secondly, the nature of the items that are in there – like rugs, blankets and other items made of resin – so the fire is still boiling because of that.”
Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab told reporters at the scene that 65 people were still missing.
Rescue officials said six people were killed and 20 injured.
According to media reports, people chanted slogans and criticized the mayor, who arrived at the scene 23 hours later.
Hundreds of people gathered around the building, including distraught shop owners whose businesses had been reduced to ashes.
“We were in dire straits, down to zero; 20 years of hard work all gone,” said owner Yasmeen Bano.
The fire broke out on Saturday night, with rescue services receiving calls at 10:38pm (1738 GMT) to reports of a fire in ground-floor shops at the multi-storey Gool Square shopping centre.
“When we arrived, the fire had spread from the ground floor to the upper floors and almost the entire building was engulfed in flames,” Rescue 1122 spokesman Hassanul Haseeb Khan told Reuters.
Images from inside the mall showed the charred remains of the store and a bright orange glow as flames continued to rise throughout the building.
By Sunday night, the building’s blackened, broken metal frames littered the street, along with downed air conditioners and some store signs.
Rescue workers said parts of the building had begun to collapse and the entire building might collapse.
(Reporting by Mohammed Waseem and Ariba Shahid; Writing by Saad Sayeed; Editing by Tom Hogue and Diane Craft)