Teen rescued 50 hours after building collapse
Relatives praise ‘miracle’ after young Pakistani man walks out of factory’s rubble
ISLAMABAD— A teenager whose family assumed he was dead was rescued on Friday after 50 hours trapped under the rubble of a four-storey factory which collapsed this week in eastern Pakistan, officials said.
Rescue workers on Thursday intensified their search for survivors in the collapse of a factory near Lahore the day before after pulling out more than 100 survivors over two days, Pakistani officials said.
At least 32 bodies have been retrieved following the Wednesday collapse of the building in the eastern city of Lahore, rescue official Mohamed Rashid told the dpa news agency on Friday.
The owner of the factory was among the dead, he added.
Identified only as Shahid, the rescued teen was among the unspecified number of missing, government official Mohammad Usman said. He appeared to be in stable condition.
Shahid’s cousin Kalim Ullah told local TV reporters that the family received a mutilated body from a hospital a day earlier, held a funeral and buried it. He said the body resembled Shahid and that the family was in mourning until they saw him alive on TV.
Allah Ditta, an uncle of Shahid, also said it was a “miracle” that Shahid is alive and that relatives were rushing to Lahore from a town in the eastern Punjab province to be reunited.
Usman said Shahid crawled out from the rubble without assistance and was able to talk. He said Shahid complained about pain in his foot, but did not have any visible injuries.
The rescue came hours after authorities said hopes were starting to fade for finding more survivors. Jam Sajjad Hussain, a spokesman for the Punjab Emergency Service, said the 400 rescuers saved the lives of at least 103 workers since Wednesday, when the building suddenly caved in.
The cause of the collapse is yet to be determined. It occurred just over a week after a magnitude-7.5 earthquake hit Pakistan, killing 273 people and damaging nearly 75,000 homes.
Arshad Zia, chief of the rescue operation, told the New York Times that at least 400 rescue workers were involved, and that efforts had been intensified as time was running out to find survivors.
“After 24 hours, the chances of workers being alive seem less and that is why we have increased the speed of rescue operation,” Zia said.
The factory, located in a business park on the outskirts of Lahore, was built in 2012. Even as officials refused to speculate on the cause of the collapse, some reports cited complaints of safety and building code violations.
The factory collapse on Wednesday was the second such disaster in Lahore in recent months.
In September, the roof of a garment factory collapsed, killing four workers.
In 2012, a fire at a garment factory in the southern city of Karachi killed 259 workers in the worst industrial disaster in the country.
“Workers are being killed for their work,” Khalid Mahmood, a labour rights activist based in Lahore, told the New York Times.
“These incidents are happening because there is no factory inspection being done in real terms all over Pakistan. There is no political will in government to implement factory inspection and other labor laws.” With files from The New York Times