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

Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2026