Hearing a loud bang, Mohammad Sharif who was reciting the holy Quran at a nearby mosque after Fazr prayers, hurried out and ran towards the Tampaco Foils factory in Tongi.

Risking their lives, he and two others, including an auto-rickshaw driver, first rescued eight fatally injured workers found lying near the entrance gate of the factory building.

Taking the injured to safety, they rushed back and recovered eight dead bodies from the ground floor. By now, the fire that followed the sound of the explosion raged to the second and third floors and so they could not make further attempts to rescue the workers trapped inside.

Sharif, auto-rickshaw driver Mohammad Mostofa, and another local Md Jahid later took the injured to Tongi General Hospital.  There they didn't find any doctor. They immediately made arrangements to send the injured to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) by an ambulance.

Sharif, aged 18, who works in a local factory in Tongi, was sharing this experience with The Daily Star at Dhaka Medical College Morgue.

He said, “Within two to three minutes [after the sound of the explosion], I reached the spot from the mosque and saw an inferno on the ground floor of the building.

 “I think the injured workers were coming out as we found them lying near the entrance.”

There was no other vehicle around at the time and so the three rescuers made several trips to and from the spot by the auto-rickshaw to take the injured to the Tongi hospital, Sharif said. 

Within half an hour when “we came for the second time to take injured workers to the hospital, I saw a huge inferno all over the second and third floors.”

Of the injured rescued by them, two died later at the DMCH, hospital sources said.

“Though we risked our lives, we couldn't save them. We could have saved their lives had doctors been available at the Tongi hospital,” Sharif said. 

Another injured worker Rasel Khan rescued by others said he had fallen unconscious while coming out of the building around 6:00am when the shift changed at the factory.

He had the night shift from 10:00pm to 6:00am. He finished his duty a little before 6:00am and moved out.

As he reached the front gate, he heard the huge sound inside the building.

“I saw bricks and plaster of the walls falling on me. I don't have any idea what happened later as I fell unconscious.”