The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Karachi

At least 40 people were killed, more than half of them children, when a fire tore through dozens of homes in a shanty town in Pakistan's largest city Karachi, officials said Friday.

Initial reports indicated the blaze in the teeming southern port city was sparked by a power wire that fell onto the roofs of the huts, said the health minister of Sindh province, Saghir Ahmed.

City police official Majid Dasti told AFP that investigators were also looking into the possibility that residents had started a small fire to beat the cold, and that the wind whipped the flames out of control.

Twenty-two children were killed in the blaze, which broke out just before midnight (1900 GMT Thursday) when most residents were asleep, city police Waseem Ahmad said.

Two people died in hospital in the hours after the fire, taking the toll to 40, Ahmad said.

More than 20 people were injured, some of them suffering severe burns, said Mashhood Zafar, an official at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital in Karachi.

An AFP photographer at the scene said more than 30 huts had been gutted in the massive blaze. The provincial health minister said the huts destroyed had been home to about 200 people.

"This is just a catastrophe. I have lost everything. My life is destroyed," said weeping survivor Mohammed Khan, whose wife and two children were killed.

Thick black smoke could be seen rising from the scene of the blaze in Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital on the Arabian sea which is home to more than 12 million people.

Some residents wept as others desperately combed through the ruins looking for survivors.