Dhaka, Bangladesh
CNN
—
Hundreds of students gathered outside the smoldering remains of a school in the Bangladeshi capital on Tuesday to demand answers after a military jet slammed into the campus, killing dozens of children.
An ordinary school day turned into terror on Monday when a Bangladesh Air Force jet suffered a mid-air mechanical fault and ploughed into the Milestone School and College in Dhaka, engulfing the two-story building in flames and smoke.
Young students were finishing up afternoon classes and parents had gathered outside the gates to greet their children when the aircraft hit, killing at least 31 people – including at least 25 children – in the country’s deadliest air incident in recent memory. Some 165 others were left injured, the armed forces public relations directorate (ISPR) said Tuesday, many with severe burns.
That most of the dead and injured are young children has compounded the tragedy that shocked the nation of 171 million people and sent the country into national mourning.
As police and air force personnel worked at the scene to retrieve parts of the crashed plane on Tuesday, the gathered crowd began shouting at officials, with some students telling CNN they believe the death toll may be higher than officially released.
The government has denied it is withholding information about the casualties of the crash, state media BSS News reported, citing the Chief Adviser’s press wing. It added that the identities of those killed are still being verified.
At the crash site on Tuesday, witnesses were still visibly shaken by the horror they had seen the day before.
“We saw scattered parts of different bodies, of children, guardians,” Mohammad Imran Hussein, a lecturer in the school’s English department, told CNN.
“I cannot express everything in words,” he said, emotionally distressed and struggling to speak.
Hussein said he was in a school building across the playground when the jet crashed.
“The sound was really intolerable. And I looked around to see what happened, I saw the tail of the plane. I saw a huge flame of fire,” he said.
Milestone College has a kindergarten, an elementary school and a high school on its campus. The building destroyed in the crash was one of about 20 housing almost 100 students between the ages of six and 13, Hussein said.
“It’s like this building was turned into a death trap. It was horrible, totally horrible,” said Sheik Rameen, 21, a student at the high school.
“I saw a lot of children, I tried to save their lives,” he told CNN at the site. “I saw a burnt child seek help but nobody came to help them.”
Nine-year-old Zunayet Hasan was one of the many children killed at the school.
That morning he had gone upstairs to say goodbye to his grandfather in their family home in Dhaka. His father had packed his breakfast and took him to his classes as usual, along with his older brother, just a five-minute walk away.
When his family heard of the crash, they rushed to the school in search of their boys.
“Luckily we found the older one healthy and safe returning to us,” the grandfather, Muhammad Ali, 65, told CNN from his home.
“His face was completely blackened,” said the boy’s father, Muhammad Aslam. “I went and hugged him strongly, and my own chest was burned. After I held him I felt like life returned back to me.”
But they could not find Zunayet. He was studying in Class 3, which took the brunt of the crash.
“Then we saw his ID card on a post in Facebook and recognized it, and were told to come to the hospital,” Ali said.
In the burns unit, Zunayet was put on life support but his injuries were too much.
“I saw my son was no more,” said Aslam.
Described by his grandfather as wise beyond his years, Zunayet’s death has devastated the family. His parents are inconsolable.
“That my son would never return again. My son, whoever he would talk to, they would adore him. Even if the neighbors in the area didn’t recognize me, a lot of them knew my son,” Zunayet’s father told CNN.
“What I witnessed with my own eyes, the bodies, the kind of corpses. How would I understand that this was my son?”
The FT-7 jet was on a routine training mission when it crashed soon after take off at around 1:18 p.m. local time on Monday (3:18 a.m. ET) after a mechanical fault, according to BSS News, citing the country’s armed forces.
The plane’s pilot, who has been named as Flight Lieutenant Towkir Islam, made “every effort to divert the aircraft away from densely populated areas toward a more sparsely inhabited location,” the military said.
The F-7 BGI is the final and most advanced variant in China’s Chengdu J-7/F-7 aircraft family, according to Jane’s Information Group. Reuters reported that Bangladesh signed a contract for 16 aircraft in 2011 and deliveries were completed by 2013.
Images from the crash site showed parts of the mangled wreckage of the jet lodged into the side of the scorched school as emergency crews continued their operations.
Following the crash, emergency crews and families rushed the injured to hospitals in the capital where doctors raced to treat severe burns caused by the inferno. The hospitals quickly became overwhelmed with frantic relatives desperate for news of their loved ones.
Most of the injured at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital’s burns unit are children under the age of 12, resident surgeon Harunur Rashid told Reuters.
Video shows crowds waiting outside the hospital and waiting rooms packed with anxious families.
Bangladesh’s interim government leader Muhammad Yunus said on Monday that, “I have no words. I don’t know how to begin.”
“None of us ever imagined it. It wasn’t within anyone’s expectations. But we had to suddenly accept this unbelievable reality,” Yunus said in a video message.
Yunus said the training aircraft “crashed and fell upon these innocent children” and many were “burned to death in the fire.”
“What answer can we give to their parents? What can we possibly say to them? We can’t even answer ourselves,” he said.
