Two sleeping brothers die in house fire

When little Palash and Tushar were asleep beside their father yesterday, there was a tragedy in the making. A fire, presumably originating from a mosquito coil, broke out and spread all over the house around 2:45am. By the time, the father woke up, the two boys were dead.

Palash was 12 and his brother Tushar was 7. Their injured father, Iqbal Hossain, 55, is undergoing treatment at the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH), said Kazi Wazed Ali, officer-in-charge of Jatrabari Police Station.

Iqbal, a motor mechanic, lived with his three sons and wife Brishti Akhter in a tin-roof house at Matuail, Dhaka. On Friday, Brishti and her youngest son were at her father's house in Narayanganj.

Iqbal suffered 14 percent inhalation burns, but his condition is critical because the injuries were in his face, throat and windpipe said Bachchu Miah, sub-inspector of DMCH Police Outpost.

Ataur Rahman, a duty-officer at the control room of the Fire Service and Civil Defence, said, “The fire might have been originated from a mosquito coil.” Two firefighting units doused the flames after an hour of efforts, and recovered the charred bodies of the two children and rescued their injured father from inside the house, he added.

The boys' mother, Brishti, who came home from Narayanganj in the morning, said her husband was yet to know about the death of their two sons. The two siblings never went to school, and Palash sometimes used to drive rickshaws, she said.