Dhaka:

At least 21 people, including 15 women, were killed and another 50 injured in a fire at a clothes factory in Gazipur district, near the Bangladeshi capital, reports said last Friday.

The fire had engulfed the Garib & Garib sweater factory late on Thursday night, and the victims, all workers, died of suffocation and in a stampede as they tried to escape.

The victims were mostly those workers stranded on the second and third floor of the factory. The injured were being treated at local hospitals. It took more than two hours for fire tenders to douse it.

(India Blooms News Service)