Nearly three weeks after a Bangladesh garment-factory building collapsed, the search for the dead ended Monday at the site of the worst disaster in the history of the global garment industry. The death toll: 1,127.
Mohammed Amir Hossain Mazumder, deputy director of fire service and civil defence, told The Associated Press the search for bodies from the April 24 collapse was called off at 6 p.m. “Now the site will be handed over to police for protection. There will be no more activities from fire service or army,” he said.
Bulldozers and other vehicles have been removed from the building site, which will be fenced with bamboo sticks. Red flags have been erected around the site to bar entry.
The last body was found on Sunday night. A special prayer service will be held Tuesday to honour the dead, he said. For more than 19 days Rana Plaza had been the scene of frantic rescue efforts, anguished families and the overwhelming smell of decaying flesh.
"We have reached the end of our salvage operations here," an army spokesman at the collapse site here on the outskirts of capital city Dhaka told reporters.
He said commander of the army-led salvage campaign Maj Gen Chowdhury Hassan Sarwardy was expected to call a press conference at the site of the collapsed building which housed five garment factories, 300 shops and a branch of a private bank.
The spokesman's comments came as a senior army officer familiar with the rescue operations said they nearly wrapped up searches for more bodies under the concrete ruins after rescuers only found few limbs of human corpses in the past two days.
Army troops, fire fighters and ordinary volunteers rescued 2,444 people alive as the country simultaneously exercised its biggest ever salvage campaign earning high appreciations alongside the criticism for lack of safety standards blamed for the disaster.
Officials said 827 bodies were taken away by relatives while 200 bodies which could not be detected by relatives were buried as undetected bodies after their DNA test was carried out."We have handed over 33 bodies to Anjuman-e-Mafidul Islam alone today after their DNA tests for their burial," a doctor at the state-run Dhaka Medical College Hospital told PTI.
Witnesses at the collapse site said truck loads of debris were being carried to two nearby locations, one on the bank of the local Bangshi River where government inspectors were searching out valuables to be kept at the government warehouses."The ruins were expected to be completely removed in next few days, but the army is expected to hand over the charge of the salvage campaign to the local administration," an official of Dhaka's district administration said.
Miracles were few, but on Friday, search teams found Reshma Begum, a seamstress who survived under the rubble for 17 days on dried food and bottled and rain water.
Begum spoke to reporters Monday from the hospital where she is being treated in a Dhaka suburb. She told them she never expected to be rescued alive and she vowed, “I will not work in a garment factory again.”
It is still unclear how many people were in the illegally constructed Rana Plaza on April 24 when the structure collapsed, a day after a huge crack was spotted.
Tuesday 14 May 2013
http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/05/13/bangladesh_factory_collapse_search_for_bodies_ends_as_death_toll_reaches_1127.html
http://www.business-standard.com/article/international/bangla-army-to-end-salvage-campaign-as-collapse-toll-hits-1127-113051300533_1.html
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