The fire broke out at Tazrin Fashion factory in suburban Ashulia Savar, 30 km from Dhaka, last night and quickly spread to the ground and first floors of the six-storey building, officials and witnesses said on Sunday.
"We have so far retrieved 124 bodies (and) rescue campaign is still underway," Major Mahbub Hossain, a senior fire service official, said, adding that most of the bodies were found severely charred.
He said the fire service said the toll could rise.
Fire service officials earlier said several workers of the factory were trapped inside and took shelter on the rooftop of the structure awaiting rescuers.
Efforts were still underway to extinguish the blaze with authorities mobilising several fire fighting units.
Television footage showed army troops and fire service rescuers bringing out bodies one after another from the debris as hundreds of people, including relatives of the victims, waited outside.
General Officer Commanding of nearby Savar Cantonment Maj Gen Syed Hassan Suhrawardy, who is overseeing the rescue campaign, said the bodies would be kept at a nearby primary school premises from where relatives could take them for burial.
Many workers jumped from the factory's upper floors to escape the flames before firefighters arrived to put the blaze out.
The cause was not immediately known but such fires are usually blamed on short circuits.
Authorities called out extra police force at the scene as angry relatives and fellow workers damaged a fire engine, protesting the delay in dousing the blaze.
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Save Dissent to Save Democracy THE rising instances of physical violence and threats against political opponents and the inability to accept dissent must raise huge concerns amongst all of us who see democracy as perhaps the really stellar achievement since Independence. AAP’s attack on BJP headquarters and acts of arson committed under the very noses of their elite leadership; the attacks on Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia in Gujarat in the last two days; the recent manhandling of the caretaker of journalist Siddharth Varadarajan’s house by some garden variety thugs; and the violence and threats meted out regularly to their political opponents by political parties is surely deplorable and condemnable. This is a fatally flawed trend which will destroy the very foundations of our democratic institutions if not pushed back with all the strength and condemnation that the civil society can mobilise. Replaying the past To begin with, it must be clarified that we should ...
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