Death Toll Rises to 289 in Karachi Factory Fire – Officials Still Searching for Bodies

The death toll in the Karachi plastics factory fire was revised upward from 9 to 289 today.
Officials are still searching for bodies.

A rescue worker walks past covered bodies, killed during a fire at a garment factory, after they were brought to the Jinnah hospital morgue in Karachi September 12, 2012. (Reuters)

They originally reported nine people had died in the fire.
DAWN reported:

The death toll from a garment factory fire in Karachi’s SITE area rose to 289 as more bodies were recovered from the gutted building, the city’s top administration official said Wednesday.

“The death toll is 289. This is not final, search for more bodies continues,” commissioner Karachi Roshan Shaikh told AFP.

Karachi city’s police chief Iqbal Mahmood also said rescue teams were still trying to gain access to parts of the factory, which caught fire late on Tuesday, and the death toll could rise.

“We found dozens of people dead in a large room of the factory’s basement. It was totally burnt and parts of it were smouldering, which we put out before shifting the bodies to hospitals,” Karachi fire chief Ehtesham Salim told AFP.

“Our firemen are searching every nook and corner of the factory despite having limited resources to cope with such a grave situation,” Salim said.

He added that the blaze was Karachi’s “biggest fire in terms of deaths in decades”.

Factory workers said that they made plastic utensils and under garments.

The death toll was revised sharply upwards after police earlier said the fire, which erupted late Tuesday, had killed nine workers.


Women grieve and wait outside a building for their relatives after a fire at a garment factory in Karachi September 12, 2012. At least 261 people burnt to death as fires swept through two factories. (Reuters)

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