Rana Plaza COLLAPSE
Eight months after the Rana Plaza collapse in the city’s suburb Savar, numerous human skulls and bones have surfaced at the disaster site in the past few days, hanging question marks against the Bangladesh Army-led rescue operation earlier. The body remains are being found by the locals, especially by urchins, who crossed the barbed enclosure of the site to collect waste. Although the local police admitted to the recovery in some cases, they dismissed the rest of the find as deliberate plants to tarnish the image of the government.
Talking to The Independent, a section of the Rana Plaza disaster survivors alleged that the human skulls and bones were coming out from the site. According to them, Rana Plaza has proved to be a ‘mass graveyard’. Some construction workers working near the Rana Plaza site claimed they were finding human bones almost every day.
Some students of a local school told The Independent correspondent that they found parts of two fingers recently.
Md Imdadul Islam, president of Rana Plaza Workers’ Union, an organisation founded by the surviving RMG workers, claimed that they were frequently getting information about the bones found inside the Rana Plaza collapsed site. ‘‘I saw some of the bones, including skulls, when the local people informed me about the recovery. We handed the finds to the police,” he said, adding that they had handed three such consignments to the police.
“I fear a number of dead bodies are still stuck in the debris. We urge the government to start an immediate operation to recover the buried skeletons,” Imdadul added.
On January 3, the police recovered 28 human bones including a broken skull from Rana Plaza. Local people and former workers of the garment factories housed in Rana Plaza recovered the human remains and informed the police.
However, the officer-in-charge of Savar Model Police Station, Mostafa Kamal, told reporters that miscreants had staged the bone recovery drama to embarrass the government.
But different credible local sources confirmed to The Independent that the bones and human skulls had been recovered from the collapse site.
Protesting against the OC’s remarks, the former workers organised an instant procession at the Savar bus stand area and condemned the OC’s statement. Talking to The Independent, Dhaka district police superintendent Habibur Rahman admitted that one dead body had been recovered from Rana Plaza, but expressed doubts about the other finds.
Among 100 pieces of human bones recovered on December 28, 52 included backbones, finger-bones, arm-bones, chest-bones, leg-bones, a jaw and a skull without the jaw. The bones were handed over to the Savar police, who in their primary ‘seizure report’ mentioned about 100 bones found from different points of the spot.
After receiving another consignment of human bones, including a human skull on December 31, Mostafa Kamal had told reporters that the bones being recovered were remains of cow carcass.
On December 28, the locals found about 100 pieces of human bones and handed those over to the police following four such consignments earlier this month. On December 22, the police again recovered a human skull from the site.
According to sub-inspector Shoyeb of Savar Model Police Station, some street children discovered the human skull at about 2pm while collecting waste.
Earlier, on December 13, two human skeletons and a skull were found at the same site. An identity card belonging to one Obaidul, a swing operator of the New Wave Bottoms was found along with the skeleton.
The Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) directorate in a statement on September 1 claimed 261 people, who were inside Rana Plaza during the collapse, remained untraced till then.
The Bangladesh Army identified those 261 out of 329 people, who are reportedly missing after the collapse, it said.
The Army declared the end of the search, which was much assisted by civilians, recovering 1,115 bodies from the collapse. Two hundred and thirty four dead bodies retrieved from the site were buried at Jurain Graveyard.
On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building located in Savar collapsed causing death to 1,129 people. 2,438 injured people were rescued from the building alive. The search and rescue work at the Rana Plaza ended on 13 May.
-With The Independent input
