Survivors with just hours to live cry for help

As the death toll passed 300, rescue crews struggled to save them, knowing they probably had just a few hours left to live, as desperate relatives clashed with police in their anger and grief.

Amid the chaos, the cries for help and the smell of decaying bodies at the eight-storey building, what happened to 18-year-old Mussamat Anna passes as luck. Rescue workers cut off the garment worker’s mangled right hand to pull her free from the debris.

“First a machine fell over my hand and I was crushed under the debris. ... Then the roof collapsed over me,” she said from a hospital bed.

Military spokesman Shahin Islam told reporters that 304 bodies had been recovered.

Brig Gen Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing rescue operations, said 2,200 people have been rescued. The garment manufacturers’ group said the factories in the building employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were inside it when it collapsed on Wednesday in Dhaka.

An army rescue worker, Maj Abdul Latif, said that he found one survivor still trapped under concrete slabs, surrounded by several bodies. At another place in the building, four survivors were found pinned under the debris, a fire official said.

A cameraman who accompanied a rescue crew heard two men’s anguished cries for help; it was unknown whether they are still alive.

Rescue workers said they were proceeding very cautiously inside the crumbling building, to avoid more injuries and collapses. But the trapped workers were so badly hurt and weakened that they would need to be extricated within hours if they are to survive.

Police cordoned off the building site, pushing back thousands of bystanders and relatives, after rescue workers said the crowds were hampering their work.