By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: At least 11 members of the same family have been killed after a three-storey residential building collapsed in the Pakistani city of Lahore, with rescue workers still combing through the wreckage on Thursday for a young girl believed to be trapped beneath the rubble.
The building, in the Harbanspura area of the eastern city, came down late on Wednesday night while three brothers, their wives and children, along with their visiting sister and her own children, were gathered inside for a birthday celebration.
A spokesperson for the Lahore deputy commissioner, Harris Ali, said the death toll had climbed to 11 after rescuers recovered the body of an elderly woman from the debris. Six other people were confirmed injured. He said the operation remained under way into Thursday afternoon, with a minor girl still unaccounted for and thought to be trapped somewhere in the ruins of the building.
According to the spokesperson, the three brothers had been living in the property with their families when their sister arrived with her children to mark the birthday on Wednesday evening. It was shortly afterwards that the structure gave way.
“The building collapsed floor by floor from the top down,” he said.
What triggered the collapse has not yet been established. Lahore’s deputy commissioner, retired Captain Muhammad Ali Ijaz, has ordered a formal inquiry into the circumstances, according to a statement issued by his office. The statement said he was personally overseeing the rescue effort at the scene, where teams from Rescue 1122, Punjab’s emergency service, were working alongside district administration staff to clear the debris. Heavy machinery had been brought in to speed up the search.
Officials at the site were instructed to prioritise the safe recovery of anyone still trapped, the statement added.
The disaster is the latest in a string of building and roof collapses to have struck Punjab in recent months, reviving longstanding concerns about the state of ageing, poorly regulated construction across the province.
Only a month earlier, the roof of a tuition centre in Lahore’s Kahna area caved in, killing 14 children. Police opened a case against the centre’s owners and the contractor responsible for the building the day after that collapse, with the resulting police report alleging that soil had been piled onto the roof of an already dilapidated structure, and that the extra weight had proved too much for it to bear.
In early May, a similar tragedy unfolded at a private school in Dera Ghazi Khan, in southern Punjab, when the roof of a classroom collapsed, killing four children and injuring 20 others. An investigation later found that building work was being carried out to extend the school when the roof gave way. A report compiled by the district administration concluded that the roof had been overloaded with sand and bricks stored there during the construction work, and had ultimately buckled under the strain.
The Punjab government has not issued any public statement addressing the causes identified in that inquiry.
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