HARIPUR: At least eight people, including children, were killed and 11 others were injured after a Sui Northern Gas supply line located near a factory burst and caught fire in the Hattar Industrial Estate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Haripur district, officials said.

The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained.

Dr Munawwar Afridi from Haripur district headquarters hospital (DHQ), who is also associated with the rural health centre (RHC) in the Kot Najibullah union council, told Dawn that three of the bodies were brought to the DHQ and five others to the RHC.

Haripur Deputy Commissioner (DC) Waseem Ahmed told Dawn it appeared that the deaths were mainly caused by suffocation.

He separately told the media that three to four nearby houses located within a radius of 200 kilometres of the factory had been affected by the fire.

Muhammad Amir, an official of the Sui Northern Gas Pipeline Limited (SNGPL), told Dawn that the affected supply line had a diameter of 16 inches and supplied gas to industrial estates up to Abbottabad towards the north. It was located near 400 residential quarters of Hattar Industrial Estate, he added.

Amir said while the cause of the fire was yet to be determined, area residents had informed the SNGPL about a “gas explosion and large fire” at around 6:30pm. He added that field teams rushed to the site of the incident upon receiving the information and found the pipeline on fire.

Amir said SNGPL teams, Rescue 1122 teams and personnel from other departments, including firefighters, participated in the operation to douse the blaze.

He said the SNGPL staff had cut off the gas supply to the pipeline, and yet dousing the blaze took at least two hours as rescue personnel faced difficulties due to the quantity of running gas in the supply line.

While the fire was blazing, flames could be seen from kilometres away, he said.

Amir further said that the supply line was located near the industrial estate’s factories, and it was presumed that the godowns in those units contained chemical material.

“Their leakage could have caused the fire,” he estimated, reiterating that the exact cause of the fire was yet to be determined.

DC Ahmed, who supervised the firefighting and rescue operation alongside Haripur District Police Officer (DPO) Shafiullah Khan, told Dawn that the fire was controlled after three hours of efforts.

Rescue personnel had also searched the site to ensure that there were no other casualties and no one was trapped at the site of the incident.

DPO Khan told Dawn that while the exact cause of the fire would be determined after investigation, circumstantial evidence showed that gas pressure could have caused an explosion in the supply line.