MOSCOW, April 27 (RIA Novosti) – Two owners of garment factories in a Bangladesh multi-storey building that collapsed this week outside the capital have been arrested as the death toll in the accident has climbed to over 300, local media said on Saturday.
Mahbubur Rahman Tapas and Bazlul Samad Adnan, owners of New Weave Bottoms and New Weave Style, respectively, surrendered themselves to police hours after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ordered the arrests.
A search for the owners of three other factories and the owner of the building, who are on the run, is ongoing, bdnews24.com has reported. All the five factories had allegedly forced their employees to work on Wednesday even though the building "developed big cracks," the report said.
The death toll in Wednesday’s building collapse has climbed to at least 332, Xinhua reported citing a police officer. Rescuers reportedly have come up with a list of 761 people who are still missing after the accident, the news agency said.
At least 3,000 people were working in garment factories in the nine-storey Rana Plaza building in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka, when it caved in on Wednesday morning.The building reportedly housed at five garment factories and some 300 shops that employed nearly 6,000 people in total. About 1,500 people were pulled out of the rubble alive.
Many survivors said they were afraid to enter the building when cracks appeared in supporting structures on Tuesday. Shops and banks reportedly closed for safety reasons on the same day, but garment factory workers were forced to return to their workplaces.
The cause of the collapse, already described as the country’s worst ever, remains unknown. However, an official with the local engineering department, Abdul Halim, said the three upper stories were added to the building without permission.
This is at least the second deadly tragedy to hit in the country’s accident-prone garment industry in six months. Last November, more than 110 workers were killed in a garment factory fire.
