Only two weeks after more than
900 people died in an eight-storey factory collapse, police say a garment factory
fire in an industrial district in Dhaka has killed at least 8 people on Wednesday
night.
The fire, which swept through a factory
belonging to the Tung Hal Group, a large garment exporter, occurred in the Mirpur
area of the Bangladeshi capital overnight.
“It was a big fire but we managed
to confine it on one floor,” Mahbubur Rahman, operations director of Bangladesh’s
fire service, told AFP news agency.
He added that the victims had
suffocated after rushing to a stairwell, and being overwhelmed by “toxic smoke
from burnt acrylic clothing”.
Among the victims who died of
suffocation was the owner of the factory, who was said to be holding a meeting
in the 11-storey building. But the police and fire officials reported that that
there was no worker amongst the victims as there was no overnight production.
President of the Bangladesh
Garment Manufcaturers and Exporters Association, Mohammed Atiqul Islam, told
Reuters news agency, “It is not clear to us how the accident happened, but we
are trying to find out the cause.”
Only on Wednesday, the government
announced that it had shut down 18 garment factories for safety reasons
following the April 24 Rana Plaza collapse, the worst garment manufacturing
disaster in the world that has seen the deaths of over 900 people.
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