Except one or two, many of the gates of the Gul Plaza shopping mall were closed during the inferno, while no announcement of fire was made, a survivor claimed on Thursday.
Submitting his statement to the single-member inquiry commission headed by Justice Agha Faisal, Ali Haider, who worked in a ground floor shop, said that no one from the management or any government agency came to rescue the people trapped inside the building.
Haider said he had noticed smoke on the ground floor at around 10:15pm, then he left the shop and moved towards Marston Road, where it he noticed that the fire was on the mezzanine floor.
He said he returned to his shop and noticed thick smoke but no fire, adding that after 10 minutes the fire covered his shop and two fibre luggage pieces burst near him, rendering him unconscious, then he found himself at the Trauma Centre later.
Another survivor, Mohammad Junaid, who worked on the mezzanine floor, said he noticed thick smoke in the building at 10:15pm. He said he and two other workers started leaving the premises and at 11:15pm, somehow managing to leave the building through the toilet side exit at around 11:30pm.
He explained that there were no visible passages due to thick smoke. He also said that after evacuating, he blacked out due to chest congestion and suffocation caused by the smoke and was taken to the hospital.
He said that by the time he exited the building, neither any announcement of fire had been made nor any person had come to rescue the people trapped inside the building.
