A teacher has died while saving students after a Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into the Milestone School and College in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, bursting into flames.
Just hours earlier, a teacher, Mahreen Chowdhury, had been standing at the entrance to the school, preparing to hand the second- to fifth-grade students over to their parents.
However, in a split second, what had been an unremarkable Monday lunchtime turned to horror.
Chowdhury – realising there were students still in the building’s classrooms – ran back into the burning wreckage.
“I did my best to pull out about 20 to 25 people – as much as I could,” Chowdhury’s husband Mansur Helal recalls her saying, moments before she was put on ventilation at the intensive care unit of Dhaka’s National Burn Institute. “I don’t know what happened after that.”
Chowdhury died later on Monday; in the process of rescuing the children, she had suffered burns to almost 100% of her body.
“Those kids are my kids too,” Mahreen Chowdhury told her husband as she lay dying in hospital.
She was among no fewer than 31 people killed in the accident – 25 of whom are children.
According to Bangladesh’s military forces, the F7 fighter developed a mechanical malfunction shortly after taking off for a training exercise at 13:00 local time (07:00 GMT) on Monday, and the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Md Taukir Islam, attempted to manoeuvre to a less congested region. He was among those killed.
The crash is the country’s deadliest aviation disaster in decades.
More than 160 people were injured, with an on-duty doctor at Uttara Adhunik Medical College Hospital stating that the majority were between the ages of 10 and 15, with many suffering from jet fuel burns.
A doctor at the National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery reported that more than 50 people, including children and adults, were taken to the hospital with burns.
