REPORT: Joy, disbelief as relatives embrace rescued Bangladesh factory worker

As hope faded of finding any more survivors of Bangladesh's factory collapse, Reshma Begum's family cherished one modest prayer: that hers would be the next body to be excavated from the rubble so they could at least give her a decent burial.    

Instead, Begum, 19, was brought back from the dead and hoisted on to a stretcher on Friday after rescuers saw her waving an aluminum curtain rail from a gap in the ruins where she had spent 17 days trapped in a lightless, tomb-like chamber.    

When her brother, Zahidul Islam, 33, was led into the military hospital where his sister lay prone, but strong enough to mutter a few words, he was overwhelmed by tears.    

"'Brother don't weep,' Reshma told me," Islam said in a telephone interview with Reuters.    

As army doctors and officers looked on, Islam threw aside his inhibitions, stepped forward and hugged his younger sibling.    

"Straight away I fainted, then I was taken away by the army personnel," Islam added. "The same thing happened to my mother when she learned that Reshma was still alive."    

Major Moazzem Hossain, who was involved in the rescue, said Begum had managed to say a few more words on Saturday about her ordeal.    

"At some point I fell asleep but suddenly I woke up and it was difficult to know whether it was day or night," Hossain quoted Begum as saying.    

Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Morshed, a military physician, said that Begum was recovering well. "Her kidneys and other essential organs are working normally though she is suffering from acute dehydration," Morshed told Reuters.    

Live televised scenes of Begum's salvation transfixed Bangladesh, where waves of grief have rolled from the disaster site to engulf far-flung villages where many of the young women and men who staffed the sewing lines were born.    

In common with other relatives of the missing, Begum's family had travelled from their village to gather at a schoolground near the ruined factory in Savar, a gritty industrial suburb outside the capital Dhaka, where families kept a sombre vigil for their missing loved ones.    

Hours before Begum was found, emergency crews had pulled the 1,000th corpse from the heap of rubble, twisted metal and machinery. The army said the death toll from the April 24 collapse, the world's worst industrial disaster since Bhopal in India in 1984, had reached 1,089 by Saturday.    

When word spread that a woman, identified by Bangladeshi media at first only as "Reshma", had been found - trapped but alive - her relatives began to believe the unimaginable.    


REUTERS     


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