About eight people were killed when fire broke out in an 11-story building housing a garment factory and apartments in an industrial district of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, police and an industry association official said on Thursday.
The fire broke out overnight in the Mirpur area, not long after the up to 300 workers at the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory went home for the day, fire official Nazrul Islam said. It burned parts of the first and second floors, which housed the factory, and parts of the third, which housed apartments. By early Thursday, firefighters had found eight people dead, Islam said. It was not immediately clear how many of the dead were tenants of the building. The fire comes just two weeks after a factory building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least 892 people and again raising concerns about safety measures in the country's $20 billion garment industry. A fire at a garment factory in November killed 112 people. For his part, Mohammad Atiqul Islam, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association was quoted by bangladesh independent newspaper as saying, "It is not clear to us how the accident happened, but we are trying to find out the cause." The fire broke out at a factory belonging to the Tung Hai Group, a large garment exporter, after most workers had gone home, police said. On Wednesday the Bangladesh government said it had shut down 18 garment factories for safety reasons following the April 24 collapse of Rana Plaza, which housed five garment factories making clothes for Western brands.