Rajina Aktar was sewing pockets into a pile of winter jackets bound for Europe when the fire’s toxic smoke knocked her out on a second-story floor.
In a pitch-dark panic that saw more than 350 people bolt for a single exit, someone carried the 15-year-old girl to safety. Eight others were trampled to death on the staircase, a few steps shy of daylight, in the Jan. 26 blaze at Smart Export Garments, an illegal factory on the outskirts of Bangaldesh’s capital.
Once again, foreign-brand labels were found among the burned-out wreckage, just as they had been in other episodes among a flurry of tragic fires that have set passions alight over the ugly underbelly of the country’s ready-made garment industry.
Garment making is the backbone of Bangladesh’s cash-strapped economy, accounting for annual exports worth $24.3 billion last year, about 80 percent of the country’s earnings. But the staggering frequency of lethal factory fires — which have claimed more than 500 lives since 2006 — shows that rising profits have not led to improvements in safety.
The Israeli Knesset on Monday passed a death penalty law targeting Palestinians, in a move condemned...
Israeli forces blocked two senior Catholic leaders from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in...
One of the Kremlin’s most widely viewed advocates of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Yuri Podolyaka,...
Israeli forces killed at least eight people in attacks on police stations and another location in...
