DHAKA, Bangladesh » A fire broke out in an 11-story building housing a garment factory and apartments in Bangladesh’s capital, killing at least eight people, officials said today.
The fire started Wednesday night, not long after about 300 workers at the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory went home for the day, fire official Nazrul Islam said. It burned parts of the first and second floors, which housed the factory, and parts of the third, which housed apartments.
By early today, firefighters had found eight people dead, Islam said. It was not immediately clear how many of the dead were tenants of the building.
The fire came just two weeks after a factory building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least 892 people and again raising concerns about safety measures in the country’s $20 billion garment industry. A fire at a garment factory in November killed 112 people.
Bhajan Kumar Sarkar, another fire official, said the managing director of the factory that burned Wednesday night, Mahbubur Rahman, and a police official were among the dead. All the dead had been found in the stairwell, he said.
Sarkar said it took more than three hours to get the blaze under control.
Two factories in Chittagong and 16 in the capital of Dhaka were ordered to shut operations and the government will close any plant that’s found to be unsafe during inspections, Abdul Latif Siddique, minister for textiles, said Wednesday.
The overnight fire started on the second floor of the Tung Hai Sweaters factory, said Ataur Rahman, a duty officer for Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence. The flames spread fast because the factory produced sweaters and stored raw materials that were heavily combustible, he said.
People killed were on upper floors and died from smoke inhalation, Rahman said.
The company’s parent, Tung Hai Group, was established in 1994 and has 7,000 employees, according to the company website. The group makes knitted sweaters, T-shirts, polo shirts, tank tops, fleece, pajamas and children’s wear, according to the website.
Tung Hai Group has three separate manufacturing sites in Bangladesh and has annual sales of more than $50 million, it says.
Retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and J.C. Penney Co., and labor activists have been considering an agreement to improve factory safety in Bangladesh for at least two years. Walt Disney Co., the world’s largest entertainment company, removed Bangladesh in March from a list of countries where partners can produce clothing and merchandise, according to a letter to licensees.
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The Associated Press and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
