KARACHI, Pakistan — A pre-monsoon thunderstorm knocked down houses, severed electrical cables and killed 228 people in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi, officials said yesterday.The toll from Saturday’s high winds and rain rose after 185 more bodies were counted in the city morgue, said Sardar Ahmed, minister of health for Sindh province. Initially, 43 deaths were reported.

The country’s economic hub, a dynamic but chaotic city with fragile infrastructure, frequently seethes with tension and street protests, some sparked by massive power outages. The atmosphere has been particularly tense since May 12, when political unrest left more than 40 people dead.

An official at the Edhi Foundation, which runs the morgue, said many of the victims came from Gadab Town, a cluster of villages with mud houses and other flimsy structures on Karachi’s eastern outskirts.

An Associated Press photographer who reached the area saw a power pylon toppled onto a two-story building that appeared to be a poultry farm. Some homes had collapsed while others had lost their roofs.

Dozens of bodies wrapped in white sheets were lined up in the morgue, where a man was seen crying near the body of his father.

Relatives have identified all 228 bodies, said Anwar Kazmi, a senior Edhi Foundation official. Among the 185 dead were eight children and 15 women while the rest were men, he said.

Most of the deaths were caused by collapsing homes but snapped power lines electrocuted many people in separate incidents, Ahmed said. At least 20 people were reported killed in electrocution incidents on Saturday.

Several people were reportedly killed by billboards and trees downed by gusting winds.

Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal said some 200 people were injured.

Electricity was still disrupted in some neighbourhoods yesterday. Residents, angry at having to spend a night without power to run fans or air conditioners in the sweltering summer heat, staged street protests, Kamal said.

Work on restoring the electricity supply had started and municipal workers were clearing storm-toppled trees, billboards and other debris from streets in the city on the Arabian Sea coast, he said.

A relief camp was set up in Gadab Town to provide food, medicine and shelter to people whose homes were destroyed or damaged there, said Murtaza Baluch, mayor of the neighbourhood of mainly farm and factory workers.

Dozens of people died in rain-related incidents in Karachi last year and choked drains left many streets flooded with rain water that also disrupted traffic, power and communication lines.

But Kamal said authorities had cleared old drains and built new ones, preventing massive flooding this year.

Asif Usman, an official at the Meteorological Department in Karachi, said the city experienced 17.7 millimeters of rain and winds of 70 miles per hour during Saturday’s storm.

More rain and thunderstorms are expected in Karachi and other parts of Sindh in the coming days.