The poisoned air and forgotten dead of Kemari

For the residents of Ali Muhammad Goth, a poor and dilapidated area in Karachi’s Kemari district, the new year brought only death. Between January 1-25, 18 residents, the oldest being a 30-year-old woman and the youngest a child of three, developed similar symptoms and passed away within days of each other. In a small and interrelated community that numbers barely a thousand people, no home was left unaffected and the sounds of mourning filled the air.

But there was something else in the air, said residents who placed the blame for this apocalypse on the many illegal factories that dot this neighborhood, and which, residents say, spew fumes that have turned the very air into a poisonous fume.

The symptoms matched this thesis: sudden coughing fits and fever leading to shortness of breath and a lack of appetite. Within days, those affected perished and while the official post-mortem report would not be completed for some time, circumstantial evidence seemed to prove the residents’ claims.

But then came the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) which confidently declared that these deaths were not caused by toxic gases at all, and that they had found no such gases or particulates when they conducted tests in that area. With confidence, they stated in their report: “The recent incident held at Ali Muhammad Village is never (sic) be linked with air pollution or the presence of toxic gasses in surrounding vicinity.”

Why then, did these 18 people die of the same symptoms in the same area?  The SEPA report added that the health department needed “to look into possibility of any infectious disease or ingestion of contaminated food, etc.” Measles was the likely culprit, it was claimed.

Seemingly adding weight to their theory, a testing of sample from the deceased by the National Institute of Health (NIH) found measles and at least one case of dengue.

They, and millions like them, live in a Pakistan where their children’s deaths are mere statistics, destined to be relegated to reports and the back pages of newspapers

Zarrar Khuhro

While SEPA and the local administration no doubt breathed a sigh of relief, residents were not convinced and one Khadim Hussain lodged a First Information Report (FIR) with the police, accusing the factory owners of killing his wife, his two sons and his infant daughter due to wilful negligence.

As a result, police sealed the illegal factories that they had previously apparently been unaware of, (Karachi’s zoning laws prohibit such factories in residential areas), filed cases against factory owners and arrested one owner.

But then came the final enquiry report from the department of pathology which clearly stated that the cause of the deaths was environmental pollution due to “Toxic/ poisonous gases from [the] illegal industrial area, leading to acute lung injury and subsequent severe allergic reaction… leading to respiratory failure.”

The report concludes: “The manner of death was unnatural & factors like measles were less likely to contribute to the cause of death.”

So, why did SEPA give the air an all-clear? The pathology report says this was because the SEPA team visited the area after the factories had been sealed and therefore there could have been no such gases in the air. This is also confirmed by local activists I spoke to, who say the factories only remained sealed for a day or two, and are now back in business.

Additionally, the pathology team also found that all four soil samples revealed heavy contamination from poisonous chemicals, effectively proving that SEPA, the health department and local authorities were simply not doing their jobs. The report is damning. It singles out the district health officers of Kemari for “negligent avoiding/ delaying and non-cooperative behaviour.”

Local residents put it more bluntly, accusing SEPA and local health officials of being on the take from the factory owners, allowing them to poison hundreds of people for years in exchange for money. Given the evidence, one can only conclude that they are right.

Almost this exact scenario had played out in Kemari just a few years ago, when a ‘mysterious’ gas leak claimed 14 lives and sickened over 500 people and led to protests in the area and the closure of schools. Typically, every government department had a different version of what happened, with some blaming soybean dust from a docked ship while SEPA pointed towards hydrogen sulphide emissions from the port’s oil facilities, while Karachi Port Trust claimed there was no possibility of a leakage from the port itself. Curiously, this incident also occurred in winter, much as the Ali Muhammad Goth incident did, leading some to suspect that wind currents in these months resulted in the poisonous emissions being trapped in the air and not blown away, as usually happens.

We still do not know for sure what happened in 2020, as the issue has been long since buried. There is, however, a possibility that the truth may finally come to light as the Sindh High Court has ordered that cases be registered about all the deaths suspected to be caused by the inhalation of toxic fumes from local factories over the last three years and finally fixed two petitions filed in February 2020 about the deaths that year.

Despite the court’s best efforts, it is unlikely anything will change in the long-run. The corrupt nexus between factory owners who happily sacrifice innocents at the altar of profit and the officials who benefit from that profit, is nigh impossible to break. Consider that this would not have been the case had these deaths occurred in posh Clifton or Defence; then all hell would have broken loose and heads would have rolled. But the residents of Ali Muhammad Goth, suffering from the twin curses of poverty and a bad location, are not worth the effort, it seems.

 They, and millions like them, live in a Pakistan where their children’s deaths are mere statistics, destined to be relegated to reports and the back pages of newspapers; forgotten casualties from a disposable population.

- Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News. Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro