Four-star Regent Plaza Hotel in Karachi where blaze killed 11 had no emergency exits
Hotel guests use bed sheets to climb down from windows of top floors as smoke filled the hotel
A pre-dawn inferno at a four-star hotel in Pakistan’s Karachi killed 11 people Monday and wounded 75, police said, with desperate guests jumping from windows and scrambling down knotted bedsheets to escape.
The blaze at the Regent Plaza Hotel in the centre of the port megacity broke out when many guests were still asleep, with a lack of fire alarms and emergency exits leaving many trapped in their rooms.
Watch: Deadly blaze at Pakistan hotel
At least two Pakistani international cricketers were among the guests, one-dayers Sohaib Maqsood and Hammad Azam, though they were not believed to be seriously injured.
“The hotel had no fire safety system and no fire exit to evacuate people, they had no fire alarm,” Karachi mayor Waseem Akhtar told reporters at the site.
Local Urdu TV channel Abb Takk said 200 local and foreign doctors were staying in the hotel to attend some seminar on Monday morning, when the fire erupted.
The report added that 20 Chinese engineers were also staying in the hotel and have been safely evacuated.
Seemin Jamali of Jinnah Hospital said that three Chinese people were among those injured and were in a stable condition.