Fire at departmental store: Chase owners nominated in FIR
The owners of Chase department store and others have been nominated in the FIR on charges of manslaughter following a horrible fire.
KARACHI: The owners of Chase department store and others have been nominated in the First Information Report (FIR) on charges of manslaughter following a horrible fire that broke out at a busy shopping centre in Karachi.
The FIR was lodged at Ferozabad police station under sections 322, 420, and 34 on the complaint of an official of the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) in which the Chase store’s owners and others were nominated including Adeel, Fahad and Faraz.
It read that the basement of the building was reserved for car parking but it was misused as a warehouse instead of the ground floor where the fire incident took place on June 1 at 11:30 am.
The horrible blaze claimed the life of one person and at least three people sustained injuries due to suffocation caused by the intense smoke.
The Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) declared the building dangerous after its structure was affected due to the fire at the departmental store.
According to details, the blaze had started at around 11:15 am on June 1.
Senior firefighting officer Arif Mansoori said that there was no arrangement of fire extinguishers in the department store and the building has no emergency exit.
The young man who died of smoke in the department store has been identified as an employee of the store, who was hired the day before.
According to News 360 sources, the management had ordered him not to leave the basement at any cost which led the man to lose his life just to save his job. The body of the deceased youth was recovered from the mezzanine floor which was made inside the warehouse.
Rescue officials shifted the body to Civil Hospital and later to Jinnah Hospital.
The three burn victims were shifted to the Civil Hospital’s burn ward where they are receiving medical treatment. A 32-year-old woman was also included in the wounded people, Jinnah Hospital’s Additional Police Surgeon Dr Samia Syed said.
According to News360 sources, the management of the Chase departmental store had turned the car parking space into a warehouse which was packed with stocks of different commodities ahead of Eid-ul-Adha.
News360 sources said that there are about 170 flats in the building above the warehouse of “Cheese Department Store” and the market value of each flat is around Rs30-40 million. the occupants of all these flats have been displaced since yesterday.
