Living horror

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“Tongues of fire all around me! I am being roasted alive! Help!”
These were the last words Maksuda Begum (45) sent to her husband over her mobile. Then the set went silent, in an eerie way. Akbar Hossain knew something terrible had happened to her wife. Something ominous. He turned numb.

Maksuda was then hurtling down to the ground from the sixth floor of the building. She worked as a peon on the ninth floor at the Bangladesh Steel Engineering Corporation (BSEC) office.

In her frantic scramble for life, she ran down to the sixth floor but then a wall of crackling fire and roiling smoke stopped her.

“Please tell me what will I do? Please.” She was sobbing.

“Go to the roof. Go. Go. Go.” Akbar said. But instead she threw herself out the window to the ground, to her death.

Ehsanul Haque Mia (40) was working at ntv when he heard the fire alarm. Immediately, he shot out of the office where he worked as front desk executive and blindly ran down the stairs through plumes of smoke.

When he emerged out of the inferno on the ground floor, Ehsanul suddenly remembered his colleagues still inside ntv. It did not take him a second to turn and bolt back inside the building. A wave of panicked people were clattering down, but he kept moving against the tide.

He collected a few of his colleagues and came out again. But to his horror he found the collapsible gate on the sixth floor firmly shut. Fire was leaping wildly beyond the porous barrier. He turned back and headed for the roof to find himself amidst around 200 others under the open sky.

“People were crying around me. We were all scared that the roof would turn into a frying pan if fire caught hold the floor below,” Ehsanul said.

He remembered the face of his dearest wife and thought maybe he would never meet her again. But he did not show his panic, rather he tried to calm others down.

“The chopper is coming to take us out,” he remembered telling others.

Then the chopper came, a big one, a Russian made Mi-8. The rotors snapped the air in rhythms, hovering above. A basket was lowered on a rope line and two people jumped into it. But not Ehsanul.

After what seemed like years, the chopper returned again. After painstaking minutes, it left with another guy hanging on to a rope.

But then the chopper vanished, leaving the trapped in despair.

It was now becoming difficult to breath. Oxygen was getting preciously scant. The burning smell getting stronger by every passing minutes. Ehsanul could hear people clapping with every successful rescue. And his heart sank in the roar. “It was not me who was rescued,” he though with every successful rescue.

About half an hour later, the firemen finally fixed a tall ladder to the roof and people were scrambling to climb down. Paratroopers who had landed on the roof before made them stand in a line. As luck would have it, Ehsanul was at the end of the line.

At 2.50pm, his turn came, finally. Ehsanul clambered down, breathing with difficulty straight to the medical team who clamped an oxygen mask on his face.

Abdul Momen (50), a security man, was waiting outside the room of the chairman of the BSEC. It was around 10.30am and the ’sir’ was late today. He was getting bored and unmindful of the screams downstairs. Suddenly, he found smoke rolling inside the room.

Momen jumped up and sprinted towards the stairs. Now he knew why there were all these screams downstairs! But more horror waited for him at the stairs as flames were dancing behind the roiling smoke. He turned back and did what came next to his mind — he jumped out of the open window of the second floor. Momen is now lying at Dhaka Medical College Hospital with multiple fractures on his hands and legs.

On the ninth floor, Monir Hossain, Ashok Kumar Jha and Mizan got trapped in one corner of the balcony with the flames just yards behind them. Their skin was singeing and their hair searing in the extreme heat. They could smell their body burning even above the smell of burning computer and paper files.

Their only hope was the ladder being raised from below. But then hope dimmed as the ladder could reach only to the eighth floor. Now there was a gaping 12 feet clearance between life and death.

Monir mother, Salma Begum, was watching in horror as the ladder was slowly coming down now, leaving the three trapped for certain death. She screamed on the mobile to Monir.

“Come down! Please come down!” she sounded hysteric. “Come down my son!”

But then the ladder started going up again. This time the rescuer standing on the rescue platform holding a bamboo ladder. The ladder stopped on the eighth floor and the rescuer held out the rickety bamboo structure.

There was no time to think. Monir lowered himself onto the bamboo and started crawling. It trembled dangerously and he could see the pinheads of the crowd watching him. “I cannot slip. I cannot die now!” he muttered and kept crawling. Monir does not know how he reached the steel platform of the ladder. But he knew he had seen the face of certain death.

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