Dhaka, Oct 14, (dpa/GNA) – At least sixteen people were killed, after a fire broke out at a chemical warehouse and an adjacent garment factory in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on Tuesday, firefighters said.
“We found the bodies of 16 people on the second and third floors of the factory building,” firefighting operations chief Tajul Islam Chowdhury told reporters at the scene in the evening.
The bodies have been burned to such an extent that they cannot be identified, he said, adding that the workers might have been trapped inside the factory, as the rooftop gate was locked at the time of fire.
Earlier in the day, Talha Bin Jasim, a spokesman for the Fire Service and Civil Defence department, said the firefighters retrieved the bodies from the third floor of the garment factory in the city’s northern Mirpur neighbourhood.
He said the death toll could rise as crews worked to extinguish the blaze.
Three people rescued from the scene were rushed to a hospital, he added.
Chowdhury, who led the firefighting operation, told reporters that upon arrival, crews found the three-storey chemical warehouse, the four-storey garments factory and another building, engulfed in flames.
The origin of the fire was not immediately clear, Chowdhury said, adding that it took nearly four hours to put out the fire at the factory.
“But the warehouse is still burning, emitting toxic smoke,” he said.
A survivor of the garment factory, told local broadcaster Jamuna Television that he and four others survived, by jumping from the window of the third floor.
“I heard a bang and soon I saw flames on our floor,” the man said.
Army troops were deployed in the area to prevent crowds of onlookers from gathering in the area.
Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest apparel exporter after China, earning nearly $40 billion annually, mostly from markets in the United States and Europe. The country’s garment sector employs more than 4 million workers, mostly women, across 4,000 factories.
GNA