The death toll from last month’s collapse of a garment factory complex in Bangladesh rose past 1,000 on Friday as piles of bodies were found in the ruins of a stairwell where victims had sought shelter.
Brigadier General Siddiqul Alam Sikder, the army officer overseeing the operation on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, said that the death toll now stands at 1,035 after dozens more remains were discovered overnight.
Alam said that many of the bodies were now little more than skeletons, 17 days on from the implosion of the nine-storey Rana Plaza compound in Savar.
And the stench from under the rubble suggested that many more bodies are still to be located, he said.
“We have found a huge number of bodies in the stairwell and under the staircases. When the building started to collapse, workers thought they would be safe under the staircases,” he said.
“Each time we moved a slab of concrete, we found a stack of bodies.”
