PESHAWAR: A huge fire broke out in a camp of a Chinese company working on Dasu hydropower project in Kohistan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa on Tuesday, officials said.
Both the police and Rescue 1122 said that though the camp houses Chinese engineers, surveyors and mechanics, none were injured or killed in the fire incident.
Police said the pre-dawn blaze ruined a warehouse complex for the Dasu hydropower project in the Kohistan district.
“It was a huge fire,” a Rescue 1122 official at the site told AFP. “Initially, the flames were very high and we had to call for fire brigade vehicles from two other districts.”
“It was quite a big storehouse, and apart from oil drums, stationery and machinery were also stockpiled there. That’s all been destroyed in the fire,” he added.
One police official said an electrical fault was the suspected cause of the fire.
In 2017, the water ministry awarded the construction contract for the Dasu dam to the China Gezhouba Group Company.
Since 2015, Beijing has poured billions of dollars into Pakistan under an investment scheme known as the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
In July 2021, 12 people — including nine Chinese workers — were killed aboard a bus carrying staff to the Dasu site, with Beijing insisting it was a bomb attack.
