200 die, more cry for help at Bangladesh collapse

                           
Rescuers were still searching for survivors on Thursday after an eight story building housing garment factories collapsed near the Bangladeshi capital, killing more than 200 people.           

Hundreds of rescuers, some crawling through the maze of rubble in search of survivors and corpses, worked through the night amid the cries of the trapped and the wails of workers' relatives gathered outside.              

"Save us brother. I beg you brother. I want to live," moaned Mohammad Altab, a garment worker pinned tightly between two concrete slabs and next to two corpses.                             

An Associated Press cameraman reached within a few feet of Altab, but was unable to help him.                      

The disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar came less than five months after a blaze killed 112 people in a garment factory and underscored the unsafe conditions faced by Bangladesh's garment workers, who produce clothes for global brands worn around the world.                 

After cracks were reported on Tuesday, managers of a local bank that also had an office in the building evacuated their workers.                                        

The garment factories, though, kept working, ignoring the instructions of the local industrial police, said Mostafizur Rahman, a director of that paramilitary police force.                                

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association had also asked the factories to suspend work starting Wednesday morning, hours before the collapse.                     

Bangladesh's Junior minister for Home Affairs, Shamsul Haque, said that by late Thursday morning a total of 2,000 people had been rescued from the wreckage.               

Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing army rescue teams, said the death toll had climbed to 203 as of Thursday afternoon.                        

Dozens of bodies, their faces covered, were laid outside a local school building so relatives could identify them.               

Thousands of workers' family members gathered outside the building, waiting for news of relatives, as thousands of garment workers from nearby factories took to the streets across the industrial zone to to protest against the slow pace of the rescue work.          

The garment manufacturers' group said the factories in the building employed 3,122 workers but it was not clear how many workers were in the building when it collapsed.                   

The country has about 4,000 garment factories and exports clothes to leading Western retailers, and the industry wields vast power in the South Asian nation.           


AP