DHAKA: A huge fire at a garment factory on the outskirts of the Bangladeshi capital killed at nine people yesterday, emergency services said, in the country’s latest industrial disaster. The blaze at the Aswad Knit Composite factory engulfed a warehouse and two other buildings after starting at 6pm. “It’s a massive fire. Ten fire brigade teams are working to put it out,” local police chief Amir Hossain said. “Two people have died in the fire.” He said most of the 3,000 people who work at the factory had left before the fire broke out. Fire service director Mahbubur Rahman said the blaze was allowed to spread because emergency services took more than an hour to reach the site, which is to the north of Dhaka. “There is no fire station within a 30km radius of the factory,” he said. In November last year a blaze at the Tazreen garment factory killed 111 workers. And in April the Rana Plaza factory collapse killed 1,129.
11 dead as rains lash Philippines
MANILA: Heavy rain and floods have left 11 dead in the central and southern Philippine islands, civil defence officials said. Among the hardest-hit areas was Zamboanga City, where floods again displaced thousands of people. Three bodies were found in the southern city while troops plucked shivering children out of knee-deep floodwater, said the area’s civil defence chief Adriano Fuego. “This is the worst flooding to hit the city in recent years,” he told reporters. At the city’s sports stadium, the rain has transformed a football field used by refugees from the fighting into a muddy lake. People used garbage bins and chicken wire fences as makeshift platforms to raise their tents above the brownish water. On the central island of Negros, the civil defence office reported six people drowned. Two others, including a five-year-old girl, died in floods on the central island of Panay, the office said.
Two miners saved 10 days after flood
BEIJING: Two Chinese miners were rescued early yesterday after 10 days trapped underground by a flood, state media reported, but the bodies of 10 others were found later in the day. A total of 42 workers were underground when water began pouring into the state-owned Zhengsheng coal mine on September 28, and although 30 escaped a dozen were stuck inside, the official Xinhua news agency said. Rescue efforts in Fenyang, in the northern province of Shanxi, have been continuing ever since and the two men were retrieved in the early hours of Tuesday, Xinhua added, citing the mining company’s rescue headquarters. They were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening problems. The bodies of the remaining 10 miners were recovered, the agency said in a subsequent report, adding an investigation into the accident is under way.
Agencies
