Rescuers and residents in the mega port city of Karachi worked together to pull people from the debris after the incident at around 10.10am.

“We have so far retrieved five dead bodies and six injured people,” a senior local police official, Arif Aziz, told AFP.

Up to 100 people had been living in the building, he added.

Saad Edhi, of the Edhi welfare foundation that is leading the rescue operation, told AFP there could be “at least eight to 10 more people still trapped”, describing it as a “worn out building”.

He put the death toll at four.

Roof and building collapses are common across Pakistan, mainly because of poor safety standards and shoddy construction materials in the South Asian country of more than 240 million people.

But Karachi, home to more than 20 million, is especially notorious for poor construction, illegal extensions, ageing infrastructure, overcrowding, and lax enforcement of building regulations.