Karachi, Pakistan // A predawn fire at a four-star hotel in Karachi on Monday killed 11 people and wounded 75, with desperate guests jumping from windows and scrambling down knotted bedsheets to escape.
Many of the guests at the Regent Plaza Hotel in the centre of the port city were trapped in their rooms because of a lack of fire alarms and emergency exits.
“The hotel had no fire safety system and no fire exit to evacuate people, they had no fire alarm,” Karachi mayor Waseem Akhtar said.
“We have received 11 dead bodies and 75 injured, four women were among the dead,” said Semi Jamali, a doctor at Karachi’s Jinnah hospital.
Many of the victims had suffered from smoke inhalation or suffocated, Dr Jamali said, but others had cuts or fractures suffered as they leapt from the eight-storey hotel’s upper floors to safety.
“We tied the bed sheets together to make a rope, and used that to climb down from the fourth floor,” said Khalid Mehmood, one of the injured, speaking from his hospital bed. “We also had to jump midway, as the bed sheets weren’t long enough.”
A man standing at a balcony kept waving for help but the hotel did not have any means of reaching him, another survivor, Hamid Ali, told a local TV channel.
“Four to five hours everybody was looking helpless, crying for help and nobody was there to help them,” said another of the injured, Muhammad Saeed, who was also being treated at the hospital
At least two Pakistani international cricketers were staying at the hotel – Sohaib Maqsood and Hammad Azam – though they were not believed to be seriously injured.
Police senior superintendent Saqib Memon said the cause of the fire was not clear and an investigation had been launched.
The English-language Dawn newspaper reported that the blaze broke out in a ground floor kitchen of the 400-room hotel.
Building fires in Pakistan are often caused by faulty wiring or electrical short-circuits.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press