MOSCOW, April 25 (RIA Novosti) – At least 231 bodies had been pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Bangladesh by Thursday afternoon, the BDNews24 online newspaper reported.
“Two hundred and thirty-one dead bodies have been brought out until 6.50 p.m. [12:50 p.m. GMT],” said Saiful Islam, a sub-inspector with the local police station, adding that 170 bodies have already been handed over to relatives.
The exact number of people who remain buried in heaps of concrete and broken metal remains unknown.
According to Fire Brigade and Civil Defense director general Ali Ahmed Khan, at least 3,000 people were working in garment factories in the nine-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka, when it caved in on Wednesday morning, BDNews24 reported.
The building reportedly housed at least four garment factories and some 300 shops that employed nearly 6,000 people in total. About 1,500 people were pulled out of the rubble alive.
Many survivors said they were afraid to enter the building when cracks appeared in supporting structures on Tuesday. Shops and banks reportedly closed for safety reasons on the same day, but garment factory workers were forced to return to their workplaces.
“None of us wanted to go in. The bosses came after us with beating sticks. At the end we were forced to get in,” a survivor, Nurul Islam, told BDNews24.
Police are looking for the building’s owner, who on Tuesday allegedly assured reporters that cracks in the building posed no danger. An arrest warrant has been issued for him.
The cause of the collapse, already described as the country’s worst ever, remains unknown. However, an official with the local engineering department, Abdul Halim, said the three upper stories were added to the building without permission.
This is at least the second deadly tragedy to hit in the country’s accident-prone garment industry in six months. Last November, more than 110 workers were killed in a garment factory fire.
