ISLAMABAD: Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon announced on Thursday that the provincial government has requested a judicial inquiry into a deadly Karachi shopping plaza inferno that killed around 80 people earlier this month. 

The fire broke out at Karachi’s famous Gul Plaza, a multi-story shopping complex in the city’s Saddar area, on the night of Jan. 17. The blaze killed 80 and took three days to extinguish, while rescue and relief efforts took over a week. 

Speaking to reporters during a news conference, Memon said a Sindh cabinet sub-committee, chaired by Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, reviewed a fact-finding committee report on the Karachi Gul Plaza fire. 

He said the fact-finding committee discovered that the Civil Defense department conducted fire safety audits of the mall and other buildings since 2023, but no effective, precautionary or legal action was taken to ensure such incidents were avoided. He said as a result, the Civil Defense director and the department’s additional controller for district South were both suspended. 

“A letter is being written to the honorable chief justice of the Sindh High Court in which we are requesting the chief justice to appoint a serving judge for a judicial inquiry,” Memon said. 

“So that we can review everything in accordance with the law himself and take decisions on it.”

Memon said that there were around 2,000 to 2,500 people in the building when the fire broke out, adding that these included workers and visitors. 

He said the sub-committee had also noted that fire tenders were provided water with delay which affected the firefighting services of the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC), Rescue 1122 and fire brigades. 

The minister said the government had also suspended the chief engineer and in-charge hydrants of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Corporation, and that action will be taken against them. 

Memon said the committee had also concluded that the KMC, Rescue 1122 and fire brigades’ firefighting tools and training to deal with an inferno of such a scale were “inadequate.”

He said the government has also suspended the senior director of municipal services in the KMC and that departmental action against him will be taken for not ensuring that the fire staff was properly prepared to tackle such a blaze. 

The minister said the sub-committee had directed the relevant department to carry out a needs assessment so that the firefighting capabilities of the provincial and local government are further strengthened. 

Fires have become an increasingly frequent occurrence in Karachi, a megacity of more than 20 million people, where fire services remain severely overstretched and under-resourced relative to population density and the scale of commercial activity.

Successive deadly incidents have drawn criticism of the provincial Sindh administration over lax enforcement of building codes, inadequate inspections and limited emergency response capacity.

Sindh’s opposition parties, especially the Muttahida Quami Movement-Pakistan, accuse the Sindh government of neglecting Karachi’s infrastructural development. The provincial government rejects these allegations.