ACHILD will be tried in a court of law over January’s deadly Gul Plaza fire that claimed 72 lives, but not, it seems, the district administration, or the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, the Sindh Building Control Authority, Civil Defence, the fire department or Rescue 1122. The charge-sheet filed in court by the investigating officer assigned to the case names only six persons — an 11-year-old child, his shopkeeper father and four members of the Gul Plaza Management Committee. No one else has been deemed responsible for the loss of dozens of lives and the more than 1,000 shops gutted in the fire. It is worth noting that the charge sheet was filed without the findings of the judicial commission that probed the incident included, and that it was turned down three times on previous occasions due to defects cited by the prosecution. However, a district prosecutor last week gave the investigating officer the go-ahead to ignore those objections and file the case.

It is worth asking why only shopkeepers and managers will be prosecuted, and not the regulators whose job it is to prevent exactly this kind of disaster. The defence counsel pointed this out in court, asking why various departments and regulators do not appear as the accused. A charge sheet built entirely around fire-safety violations, while excluding the bodies statutorily responsible for fire safety, seems like a gross attempt to scapegoat civilians while allowing those departments and officials who enabled this tragedy with their negligence and complacency to go scot-free. Karachi’s building safety failures are chronic and well-documented. The city is no stranger to preventable tragedies that keep occurring with alarming frequency due to regulatory failures. If the Gul Plaza prosecution too ends with a shopkeeper’s family bearing legal consequences while the SBCA, KMC and civil defence escape scrutiny, the case will have punished the easiest targets rather than the responsible ones. And, most alarmingly, nothing will have changed.

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2026