Family members torn between hope and despair at site of collapsed buildings in Karachi.

Byline: Shazia Hasan

KARACHI -- On a footpath on the road adjacent to the three collapsed buildings in Rizvia Society on Thursday sat Abdul Rasheed and his extended family. An elderly woman in a black abaya was being helped and urged to sip water while she wept uncontrollably, begging all those around her to go and find the children. A man was telling her all would be well, that God willing the family would have survived and they would soon hear something positive from the rescuers.

Abdul Rasheed later told Dawn that he was at work in Keamari when he received a call from a neighbour a little after 11.30am to say that their building had collapsed and his family was trapped under the rubble. 'I called my brother, who informed the rest of the family as I rushed here. They have found my six-year-old daughter Alina, who was rushed to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital. One of my brothers is there and he says she has a fracture in her foot. The rest of my family - my wife, my 14-year-old daughter Sarah, 12-year-old Hira and two-year-old son Abdul Rauf - are still trapped under the rubble. Our flat in the six-storey building was on the fourth floor,' he said.

'They are pulling out people, some dead, some alive. My other brother Abdul Bari is near where the rescuers are at work and he says he just saw a hand, which he thinks might be my wife's, and he saw it move. Please pray, please pray my family is safe,' he said.

Suddenly he saw another female relative coming towards him with tears in her eyes. He ran to her with crazed eyes and screamed at her to tell him what happened. Had she seen or heard something he had not. The poor woman quickly wiped the tears away and quickly calmed him down repeating again and again that she knew nothing more than what he knew. She was just crying because she was frustrated and wanted to see their family safe and sound as he did.

'It is common practice in this area to bribe officials to look the other way even if they know of this kind of illegal construction'

The three buildings looked like a collapsed house of cards, one overlapping over the other with the first two buried in the ground. There were frustrated onlookers who wanted to know why the rescuers were digging out the rubble with small spades. It was explained to them that big machines may injure the people trapped underneath.

Waqas Ahmed, who was there with his uncle, said that his aunt Dr Ghazala Shahid was a homeopath, who was just wrapping up and about to leave...