Plant collapse kills at least 18 people in Pakistan

Baku. 5 November. REPORT.AZ/ At least 18 people were killed and dozens wounded when a factory undergoing expansion collapsed into rubble Wednesday evening in an industrial park in eastern Pakistan, Report informs referring to the foreign media, rescue workers and government officials said.

Seventy laborers were pulled out from the debris alive, rescue workers said, but about 100 are still believed to be trapped underneath. Excavators and cranes were used to dig through the rubble and debris to look for survivors.

Troops from the army’s engineering corps have also been sent to the factory, near Lahore, to help in the rescue effort, a spokesman for the military said.

A state of emergency was declared in Lahore hospitals.

The site, run by Rajput Polyester Factory, manufactured plastic shopping bags. The factory is in the Sundar Industrial Estate, a 1,750-acre business park about 28 miles southwest of Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, officials said. At least 250 workers were employed there.

The exact cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, said Ahad Muzaffar Shah, a senior official of Bahria Town, a prominent property and real estate developer whose rescue team also reached the site.