Around 17 people, including two women, were killed and more than 100 injured on Tuesday in an explosion in a seven-storey building located at a crowded market in the Gulistan area of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, reports said.
The explosion took place around 4:45 pm near the BRTC bus counter, fire officials were quoted as saying by The Daily Star. Eleven firefighting units are working at the scene to carry out a rescue operation, duty officer of the fire service control room Rashed Bin Khaled said.
“Sixteen bodies have been found (so far), but the toll could rise as the rescue operation is underway,” a fire service official was quoted as saying by PTI.
One person succumbed to his injuries at the hospital, raising the toll to 17. Health Minister Zahid Maleque said, “most of the deaths were caused by brain hemorrhage.”
While the cause of the explosion is yet to be known, local residents suspected chemicals, mostly used as an office and business complex that were illegally stored inside the building, might have sparked the blast.
Shortly after the incident, DMCH police outpost Inspector Bacchu Miah said the blast injured more than 50 people, and they were taken to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) for treatment. At least 14 of them were dead, he said.
Director of Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) Brigadier General Md Nazmul Haque has told reporters 14 of the injured in the explosion have succumbed after being taken to the hospital.
According to The Dhaka Tribune newspaper, the death toll is likely to increase as several people are feared trapped in the basement of the building.
‘People Were Running Around in Panic’
Eyewitness Safayet Hossain, a local shopkeeper, told The Daily Star that he had initially thought it was an earthquake. “The entire Siddik Bazar area was shaken by the blast,” he said.
“I saw 20-25 people lying in the road in front of a damaged building. They were seriously injured and bleeding. They were crying out for help. Some people were running around in panic,” he added.
The explosion, which occurred on the south side of the Gulistan BRTC counter, impacted a five-storey building that housed a sanitary shop on the ground floor, a Brac Bank office on the remaining floors, and a nearby seven-storey sanitary market building, according to The Daily Star. However, despite the impact, none of the buildings collapsed.
Fire officials said the blast occurred on the ground floor, and the first two floors of the building were badly damaged.
The Rapid Action Battalion’s bomb disposal unit rushed to the spot to inspect the buildings.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police commissioner Khandker Golam Faruq said the explosion seemed to be an accident and not an act of sabotage.
Bangladesh President Mohammad Abdul Hamid prayed for the salvation of the departed souls and conveyed his deepest sympathies to the bereaved families, according to a Dhaka Tribune report.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is currently in Doha for the United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, prayed for the peace of the departed and urged authorities to take prompt action to ensure better treatment of the injured, the report said, quoting Prime Minister’s Press Wing sources.
The capital had reported a suspected gas explosion on Sunday, in which three people were killed. On Saturday, seven people were killed and several injured after a fire broke out following an explosion at an oxygen plant in southeastern Bangladesh.
Dhaka’s History of Industrial Disasters
Bangladesh has a track record of industrial calamities, including factories catching fire and trapping workers inside. Oversight organisations have attributed the root cause of these incidents to corruption and lenient enforcement measures.
In 2012, 117 people were killed after they were locked behind exits of a garment factory in Dhaka.
The nation’s worst industrial disaster happened a year later. The Rana Plaza garment factory, situated outside Dhaka, collapsed, leading to the deaths of over 1,100 people.
A fire broke out in a 400-year-old area in Dhaka that was heavily packed with apartments, shops, and warehouses, resulting in the deaths of a minimum of 67 individuals.
In 2021, a fire at a food and beverage factory outside Dhaka killed at least 52 people as they were trapped inside by an illegally locked door. Last year, at least 13 people were killed when a fire swept through a plastics factory in Dhaka.
Tuesday’s incident came days after a fire destroyed 2,000 shelters at a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar on Sunday, leaving around 12,000 people homeless. The fire broke out at camp number 11 in Kutupalong, one of the world’s largest refugee settlements.
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