Fire at Karachi furniture market brought under control, no casualties

Firefighters brought a fire at a furniture market near Kamran Chowrangi in Karachi's Gulistan-e-Jauhar under control on Friday after the flames spread to an adjoining residential building, officials said. No one was reported killed or injured.

Chief Fire Officer Humayun Khan said four fire tenders and one water bowser were used in the operation and confirmed there had been no loss of life. Fire brigade officials said the main blaze had been brought under control and that cooling was under way to stop it reigniting, Geo News reported. Rescue 1122 said the fire at the residential building was also contained.

A shopkeeper, Asghar, told reporters the market consists of 20 shops. He said the fire was first reported to the Madadgar-15 police helpline, whose staff said they would inform the fire brigade, but that the tenders reached the site 15 to 20 minutes later, by which time the flames had spread through the market. He said the shops stand on a commercial plot and put the losses in the millions of rupees.

Officials did not confirm a cause or a financial figure. Geo News reported that neither the cause of the fire nor the extent of the damage had been officially established.

The same market has burned before. ARY News reported that a fire in December 2024 destroyed more than 40 per cent of the furniture there and affected over 80 shops, with seven fire brigade vehicles sent to the scene. Geo News put the date at December 31, 2024 and reported that more than 30 shops were gutted, with no casualties and the cause undetermined.

The repeat fire comes after a fire safety review ordered in Sindh this year. Following the Gul Plaza inferno in January, Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah ordered a province-wide fire safety audit of major government, private and commercial buildings and approved the resumption of annual safety inspections of commercial buildings, which had been discontinued years earlier.

A Sindh Building Control Authority audit found that 90 per cent of buildings surveyed in the city's eastern, central and southern districts lacked fire-safety arrangements. The authority issued notices to more than 300 building owners warning that premises could be sealed without the required measures, and in February the district administration sealed two major commercial buildings in Saddar for breaching fire safety regulations.