The death toll from Bangladesh’s worst industrial disaster rose to 540 on Saturday after 15 bodies were overnight pulled from the wreckage of an eight-storey building housing garment factories, the army said.
Major Sazzad Hossain of the army control room, which was set up to coordinate the rescue operation following the disaster last month, said that recovery efforts had gathered pace and the “death toll now stands at 540”.
The building housing five garment factories collapsed near the capital Dhaka on April 24, trapping more than 3,000 people. Some 2,437 people have been rescued, Hossain said.
Clutching photographs of their missing loved ones, scores of distraught relatives gathered at the disaster site for an eleventh day, as cranes and bulldozers cut through a mountain of concrete and mangled steel.
Preliminary findings of a government probe has blamed vibrations by four giant generators set up in the factory compound’s upper floors for triggering the collapse.
