The death toll of the deadly fire at Karachi’s Gul Plaza reached 67 on Thursday as rescuers continued to comb through the wreckage of the gutted building.
Police Surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed issued a list of 67 individuals, only seven of which had been identified. Earlier in the day, she had issued a list confirming the deaths of 50 people.
A separate statement issued by the Sindh health department spokesperson also said that the post-mortem examination of 67 bodies had been conducted.
The updated death toll comes a day after officials found the bodies of 30 people from a single shop on the mezzanine floor. The plaza, parts of which have collapsed due to the blaze, was a ground-plus-three-storey building with 1,200 shops spread over 8,000 square yards.
Rescue 1122 spokesperson Hassaanul Haseeb Khan told the media that urban search and rescue teams were conducting a search operation with the help of a thermal imaging camera (TIC).
“Urban search and rescue teams are working at the incident site and using specialised tools and cutters,” he said. The official said that the camera detected heat up to 1,500°C. However, the temperature of the shopping mall was higher affecting the remains of the victims, he regretted. He said that officials had never experienced such an incident in recent memory, adding that cooling work had been ongoing for the past three days.
He said that the building’s structure was dilapidated, due to which authorities were exercising extreme caution during the search operation. He said that there was no way inside the buildings due to which rescue workers cut through the walls, which triggerred “vibrations”. Therefore, the work which should have taken 10 to 20 minutes to finish, took between one and two hours.
Meanwhile, a technical committee has recommended that the blaze-damaged Gul Plaza be demolished after completion of the ongoing search operation, declaring the structure “dangerous”.
The technical committee, comprising officials from the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) and the Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) made the recommendations after visiting the gutted plaza on Karachi’s MA Jinnah Road.