'I never dreamt I'd see daylight again'

THE MIRACLE OF DHAKA

Trapped for 17 days in the ruins of a Bangladeshi building, an 18-year-old reveals to her rescuers how she survived her gruelling ordeal.

For days, every call for survivors in the rubble of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh had gone unanswered. Then, on Friday, a female voice, weakened by 17 days of being trapped in a sun-baked ruin of concrete and masonry, called back "Save me" - and a rescue hailed as a miracle took place.

Reshma Akhter, an 18-year-old seamstress, was dug out of the twisted wreckage of a building in which 1045 other people are known to have died.

She survived in a cavity, finding herself with enough food and water to achieve one of the greatest feats of endurance in the aftermath of disaster.

The slender young woman had spent days calling for help from rescue workers without being heard. "I kept hitting the wreckage with sticks and rods just to attract their attention. No one heard me. It was so bad for me. I never dreamt I'd see the daylight again," said Akhter from her hospital bed.

Hundreds of people were crushed beneath tons of concrete when the eight-storey building collapsed under its own weight on April 24.

Five garment factories were inside, making this the worst industrial disaster in the history of the global clothing industry.

When the building started to cave in, Akhter was working on the second storey inside the New Wave factory, helping to make clothes for Western brand names, including Primark and Bonmarche, the low-cost British retailers.

As the building fell in on itself, she managed to flee down a staircase, eventually finding herself trapped in a hollow in the wreckage created by a pillar and a beam.

Rana Plaza had also housed a market with shops and restaurants, perhaps explaining how food and bottled water were within reach of the cavity.

Three of Akher's colleagues were trapped alongside her in the same recess, but all died in the days that followed. Akhter spent her last days in the wreckage trapped next to their corpses.

Then, finally, her calls for help were heard.

Jamal Sheikh, a rescue worker, heard her cries shortly after 3pm on Friday. For days, he and his colleagues had been resigned to finding nothing but dead bodies, believing that their task had changed from saving survivors to clearing the 7000 tons of rubble.

Then came the high-pitched call: "Help me, save me."

Sheikh recalled: "I asked if there was anyone inside the debris and then someone, a female, replied."

When Akhter was pulled from the rubble - a delicate operation that took 40 minutes and required a hole to be specially drilled - Sheikh said that her first action was to beg for food. She had run out of anything to eat two days earlier.

As she was brought to safety, she appeared remarkably unscathed in a mauve salwar kameez (traditional dress) and a pink dupatta scarf.

When she was taken by ambulance to hospital, dozens of clearance workers joined in prayers of thanks, led by a man with a loud-hailer.

Once in a hospital bed, she managed to smile weakly for a television interview and also took a telephone call from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose government has been heavily criticised for failing to enforce building safety standards in the capital and elsewhere. The prime minister waited five days before visit-ing the scene of the worst industrial disaster in her country's history.

She told Akhter that her survival was an "incredible feat". The woman replied: "I am fine, please pray for me."

Akhter's family had given her up for dead. Her parents and siblings had registered her as missing with the Humanitarian Assistance Centre, a local volunteer group, and then spent days visiting hospitals and mortuaries trying to discover her fate.

Day by day, the death toll from the disaster grew, rising inexorably from less than 200 in the first 24 hours to 1045 on Friday as the fate of the missing gradually became clear.

When the charity rang to say that Akhter had been found alive, her mother, Jobaida Khatun, was so shocked that she herself had to be taken to hospital for treatment.

Akhter's landlord, Monsur Ali Ahmed Nuru, said that she had been working at the New Wave factory only for a few weeks. She had taken the job as a seamstress after being abandoned by her husband.

Akhter's sister, Asma, told a television channel that the family had kept a vigil since the collapse of Rana Plaza, but they had been losing hope with every passing day. "We got her back just when we had lost all hope of finding her alive," she said. "God is so merciful."