By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: A fire swept through a multi-storey building in central Karachi on Wednesday, killing three people and injuring at least one, officials said, in the second such incident in the city in less than a week.
The blaze erupted in the commercial floors of the building, where shops selling mattresses were located, and quickly spread to the residential floors above, trapping over 100 people inside.
Firefighters battled the flames for hours, as thick black smoke billowed into the sky. The fire also damaged vehicles parked near the building.
Abid Shaikh, head of Sindh Rescue 1122, said three male bodies had been recovered from the building, one of them charred beyond recognition.
He said the fire had not yet been extinguished and it would take some time to control it.
Shaikh termed the blaze a “third-category fire”, the most severe level. “The whole building was in the grip of the flames,” he told reporters at the scene.
Humayun Khan, an official of the firefighting department, said the fire had spread from the ground floor “all the way to the fourth floor”.
Khan said the cause of the fire was not yet known, but it could have been triggered by a short circuit or a gas leak.
Waheed, a shopkeeper who witnessed the fire, said he saw people running out of the building when they saw the smoke.
“It happened in seconds,” he said. “The fire started at the mattress shops at the front of the building and then spread to the back.”
Power was cut off in the area for safety reasons, a spokesperson for the city’s electricity utility, K-Electric, said.
The incident comes just days after 11 people were killed when a huge fire ripped through a six-storey commercial building in the city’s eastern Gulistan-i-Jauhar area.
Caretaker Sindh Chief Minister Maqbool Baqar ordered a probe into the fire and formed a committee led by the Karachi commissioner to submit a report within three days.
The committee will investigate the cause of the fire and the negligence of officials, a statement from his spokesperson said.
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