Plant burns down in Dhaka as crews continue to pull bodies from collapsed Rana Plaza where hundreds died
At least eight people have been killed in a fire that swept through a Bangladesh knitwear plant in an industrial district of the capital, Dhaka, as the death toll rose to nearly 900 from a clothes factory collapse two weeks ago.
The fire broke out on Wednesday night in the Mirpur area at a factory belonging to Tung Hai Sweater Ltd, a large garment exporter, after most of up to 300 workers had gone home, police said.
By early Thursday firefighters had found eight people dead, said Mohammad Atiqul Islam, a clothing manufacturing industry spokesman.
The fire comes two weeks after the Rana Plaza factory building housing garment factories collapsed in Dhaka. As the retrieval of bodies continued, by Thursday morning the death toll stood at 892 people.
Bhajan Kumar Sarkar, a fire official, said the managing director of the factory that burned on Wednesday night, Mahbubur Rahman, and a police official were among the dead. All the dead had been found in the stairwell, he said.
Sarkar said firefighters took more than three hours to get the blaze under control.
"It is not clear to us how the accident happened but we are trying to find out the cause," said Islam, who is president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
Tung Hai's western clients are listed on several websites as including clothing chains in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Canada and Spain.
On Wednesday the Bangladesh government said it had shut down 18 garment factories for safety reasons following the 24 April collapse of Rana Plaza, which housed five garment factories making clothes for western brands. The disaster is the country's worst industrial accident. A fire at a garment factory in November 2012 killed 112 people.