Hasan Raza/Associated Press
Firefighters tried to control a fire at a garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh, on Saturday.
MUMBAI — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.
The fire department was still trying to put out the fire at Tazreen Fashions on Sunday afternoon, more than 17 hours after it started, a retired fire official in Dhaka said by telephone. At least 111 people were killed and scores of injured were taken to hospitals with burn and smoke inhalation injuries.
"The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there," said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. "The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory."
Bangladesh's garment industry, the second largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor record of fire safety. In recent years, dozens of workers, most of them women, have died in fires that experts say could have been easily avoided if the factories took the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes and widely flout safety measures.
The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor and quickly spread up the six-story building. The two-year-old factory employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to information on the company's Web site. The factory made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.
Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors and were killed, fire officials said, because there were not enough exits for them to get out.
"The factory had three staircases, and all of them were down through the ground floor," said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the fire department, according to The Associated Press. "So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building."
Nobody answered calls to a mobile phone listed as the factory's phone number.
Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments and is a big supplier to companies like Walmart, H&M and Tommy Hilfiger. Workers in the country's factories are among the lowest-paid in the world with entry-level workers making a government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month.
Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and factory owners and the government. Earlier this year, a union organizer, Aminul Islam, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka.
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