Home ›› 08 Jun 2022 ›› Front
Anxious relatives and family members have continued to gather in front of the Chattogram Medical College Hospital (CMCH) in the hopes of tracing their missing loved ones who were at the scene of a devastating fire at a container depot in Sitakunda.
On Tuesday morning, while visiting the hospital, it was seen that family members were searching the CMCH morgue for their relatives.
They dashed to every ambulance that arrived at the hospital’s emergency department and showed photos of the victims to journalists and cops, asking if they had any information about them.
Abdul Karim has been standing in front of CMCH since the morning, holding a photo of his missing brother, Abdul Monir Hossain, a forklift operator at the depot for the past eight years.
He said that Monir called his wife at 9pm the night of the incident to tell her there was a fire. “His whereabouts have remained unknown since the incident.”
Monir has been married for seven months. His wife is five months pregnant with their first child.
“I searched all the public and private hospitals in search of my brother,” Karim said, holding the photo in his hands.
“What will I answer to his wife? I just want my brother, I don’t want anything else!” Karim exclaimed.
Earlier on Monday, Munni Akhter, 25, queued for hours to give a DNA sample at a makeshift stand outside the CMCH.
When her turn finally came, she struggled to hold back tears as doctors took her blood.
Her lorry driver brother Mohammad Akhter was giving a “running commentary” on the fire on Facebook Live, she told AFP, holding up a phone showing his broadcast.
“Then after the blast, it was all dark,” she said. “Since then, we couldn’t find him.”
Meanwhile, Abdul Hannan, 60, carried a portrait of his missing son, a worker at the depot.
“My son called his wife and told her about the fire,” he said. “She heard the explosion over the phone. Since then, we couldn’t contact him anymore. I have lost my child, oh God!”
The authorities have so far identified 25 bodies out of the 43 victims till Monday morning, while the rest of the bodies remained unidentified.
Authorities couldn’t identify the bodies as the faces of most of the bodies were distorted, said officials.
Meanwhile, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on Monday started collecting DNA samples from the relatives of the victims.
At least 43 people, including nine firefighters, were killed and over 200 people were injured in a fire followed by explosions at a privately-run inland container depot in Chattogram’s Sitakunda.
The fire originated in a container, loaded with hydrogen peroxide, at around 9:30pm on Saturday (June 4) night.
