PESHAWAR: A house fire in the Tehkal Payan area of Peshawar killed a couple and their four children on Thursday, Rescue 1122 said.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Rescue 1122 spokesperson Bilal Ahmed Faizi told Dawn that the rescue service received the report of the fire at around 2:30am.

After reaching the site of the incident, it took the rescue team 45 minutes to bring the fire under control.

The team recovered the bodies of six people from a room during its search operation. These included a husband, wife and their four children — three girls aged 11, nine, and three years, and a four-year-old boy.

The man was a local worker of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Fazl (JUI-F), according to a statement issued by the party about the incident.

According to Faizi, the fire apparently started in a storage area, where furniture and mattresses were kept and spread to other parts of the residential house. However, he said that the blaze was so intense that the family was likely unable to leave the single room they were staying in.

The spokesperson noted that the children’s bodies were not burnt, which indicated that they died due to the intense heat and smoke generated by the fire.

It is not immediately clear what caused the fire, he added.

Across Pakistan, fires frequently break out in residential, commercial and industrial buildings due to crumbling infrastructure, weak enforcement of safety regulations and widespread negligence.

In March, a woman and her two children died due to suffocation after a fire erupted in their house in Hyderabad.

In January, a woman and five children lost their lives in two incidents of house fires in Punjab. In one incident in the district of Layyah, three sleeping girls, including a one-and-a-half-year-old, were caught in a fire that quickly engulfed the entire room.

In the second incident, occurring in Pakpattan district’s Arifwala, two infants and their mother died, while their father suffered burns when their house caught fire because of gas leakage.