Death came draped in smoke

Around 11:30pm, there were murmurs of one death. By then, the fire had been burning for over an hour.

Even past midnight, Brig Gen Md Main Uddin, director general of the Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence, said three dead bodies were recovered and 68 people were rescued.

Once the flame, which began at 9:50pm, was doused, the real picture began to emerge – marking this fire as the worst since the 2021 Hashem Foods Factory fire in Rupganj.

The first body to reach Dhaka Medical College Hospital was that of a child, said Bachchu Mia, in-charge of DMCH police outpost.

Then a steady stream of ambulances followed, carrying injured people – some alive, some whose state could not be ascertained yet, some who seemed to be fighting death.

But then around 1:30am, an enormous white container truck pulled over. Once the doors opened, everyone was shocked to see it full of bodies.

Hospital staffers waited with stretchers in case such an instance occurred. With their stretchers full, they whisked the bodies away one by one.

Scores of people, who had been desperately searching for their loved ones for hours at the hospital, ran towards them while Ansar men tried to control the situation.

The stretchers carried the bodies to two cramped, dimly-lit emergency morgues and placed them on the floor before going back to get more bodies. While some were in body bags, others were not.

The bodies filled both rooms to the brink.

Dr Ashraful Alam, assistant director of DMCH, said, "We were prepared to receive a huge number of critical patients and were ready with adequate manpower. But those who made it to the hospital were mostly dead-on-arrival."

The morgue doors had to be locked as relatives of the victims tried to rush inside to identify their loved ones.

They negotiated with the morgue attendants, begged to be let in, and then those who were allowed in came out broken, hysteric and in tears.

Bashona Rani sat defeated on the dirty, wet floor outside the morgue and kept bashing her head with her slippers.

She had just seen the bodies of her grandchildren Shampurna Poddar, 12, Sun Poddar, 8 and her daughter Poppy Roy. "What kind of fate is this?" she wailed.

Other than the soot stains on their clothes and dried blood near the noses, it would not be possible to identify them as fire victims.

Most of them died of asphyxiation -- carbon monoxide poisoning from smoke inhalation. The fire, which began on the first floor, hadn't reached them, but neither could the rescuers.

Lt Col Tajul Islam Chowdhury, director (operations) of fire service, told this newspaper that 32 bodies, of those who succumbed to smoke inhalation, were recovered from the Kachchi Bhai restaurant on the first floor.

The bodies were so convincingly unscathed that Ashik Ahmed, who was sitting and crying outside the hospital, was requesting his relatives to help him take his son Arhan elsewhere on an air-ambulance to save him.

But Arhan was already dead, along with his mother Nazia and younger brother.

A survivor, Prothit Shams, described what the ordeal was like.

"I could feel everything inside me burning up and that's when I honestly thought there would be no way out and this is it for me," he wrote on social media.

Prothit, who works in a logistics company, had gone to Ambrosia Restaurant & Music Café on the seventh floor of the building.

"I saw people jumping from the floor above us and what I saw next was just traumatising -- people were caught in flames and I could do nothing to help them. At that moment I thought the fire would soon reach us as well.

"There were about 20 of us stuck there. We first tried to remain calm and figure a way out but there was no fire escape and the staircase was in flames. Our floor was filled with black smoke, we were barely able to breathe," he wrote.

"One of us tried to go and see if there was any way to go to the roof but he came back coughing, saying the entire staircase was ablaze and that the scorching fire was getting closer to us."

Prothit and the others made their way to the balcony hoping to catch the attention of the fire fighters.

They were spotted and rescued.

Many others, such as Kachchi Bhai employees Jewel Gazi and his nephew Mohammad Rakib, chose to jump, risking injuries and even death.

Rakib said, "We jumped off the building as we were having breathing problems."

Mujahidul Islam Jubayer, chef of Khana's restaurant on the second floor, also jumped.

The three are receiving treatment at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.