DHAKA
\nAnguished families kept vigil outside the morgue of Bangladesh\u2019s largest hospital on Friday, waiting for the bodies of loved ones to be identified after a fire they say should never have happened.
\nAt least 46 people were killed in Thursday night\u2019s blaze in an upscale neighborhood of Dhaka, which broke out in a popular biryani restaurant and quickly engulfed a seven-floor commercial building.
\nMost of those who perished suffocated in the smoke, while the bodies of others were burned beyond recognition in the resulting inferno.
\nAmong the dead was young university student MinHajj Khan, whose failure to escape the fire was witnessed by a friend with him at the restaurant and confirmed to AFP by his older cousin at the hospital.
\nKhan\u2019s mother had traveled to the hospital insisting his companion was mistaken, angrily sending away doctors requesting a DNA swab to check against bodies brought to the morgue.
\n\u201cI won\u2019t listen to anyone. I don\u2019t believe any of you. I only want my son. Nothing else,\u201d she said, declining to give her name.
\n\u201cHe promised to take me to Makkah for the pilgrimage. How can I go to Mak without him?\u201c
\nIt took fire crews two hours to control the blaze, with members of the public stepping in to carry hoses and help guide those escaping from the building to safety.
\nBefore they arrived, many inside had rushed upstairs to the rooftop to escape the quickly spreading inferno.
\nKazi Taslim Uddin said his 20-year-old son was among the dozens being treated in hospital for injuries after being forced to clamber down the side of the building.
\n\u201cHe tried to go to the ground floor but failed as people were rushing up the opposite way,\u201d he told AFP.
\n\u201cHe grabbed some cables and tried to climb down, but they weren\u2019t long enough,\u201d he added.
\n\u201cHe jumped and got injured. The smoke also scorched his lungs.\u201d
\nFirefighters said the blaze was accidentally sparked from an improperly stored cooking gas cylinder and made much worse by the quick chain-reaction explosions of other canisters stored haphazardly around the building.
\nBereaved family members at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital were furious that nothing had been done to alert the public to the fire risk at the restaurant beforehand.
\n\u201cIt could have saved many lives,\u201d said one man waiting to retrieve the body of a cousin who perished in the blaze who declined to identify himself.
\n\u201cAll these buildings are ticking time bombs. The regulators wake up only after the disaster occurs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DHAKA Anguished families kept vigil outside the morgue of Bangladesh\u2019s largest hospital on Friday, waiting for the bodies of loved ones to be identified after a fire they say should never have happened. At least 46 people were killed in Thursday night\u2019s blaze in an upscale neighborhood of Dhaka, which broke out in a popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-391086","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n