‘Brother, forgive me’: A man’s final plea echoes after Chattogram mall blaze

A man’s desperate words to a friend becomes his haunting farewell before he suffocated in a Chattogram shopping mall fire

“Brother, please forgive me,” were the heart-wrenching words Muntasim Solaiman Aadi uttered to his friend and part-time employer Md Asif in their final phone call.

Moments later, Aadi, 27, was engulfed by smoke and flames inside the 12-storey Orchid Plaza in Chattogram’s Terry Bazar on Thursday morning.

Aadi and 52-year-old Md Yunus, both from Patiya Upazila, were among the two people who lost their lives in the fire.

Another individual trapped with them survived and is receiving treatment at Chattogram Medical College Hospital (CMCH).

Asif, who runs a shoe store on the mall’s ground floor where Aadi worked during Ramadan, said he received the panicked call around 10am.

“Aadi had gone upstairs to the mosque around 9am. When the fire erupted, he couldn’t come down,” Asif recalled through tears.

“He called me and said, ‘Brother, please forgive me…’ I urged him to move to safety.”

Orchid Plaza houses shops and factories up to the fourth floor, a mosque on the fifth, and residential units above.

Asif alleged that he informed the Fire Service and Civil Defence about Aadi being trapped on the fifth floor, but officials initially refused to go above the third floor.

“I insisted there were people up there. Thirty minutes later, Aadi was rescued -- but it was too late,” he said.

Yunus’s colleague Rupak Rudra said their employer operated tailoring shops and factories on the third and fourth floors.

“Many of us left after our shift around 4:15am, but Yunus had fallen asleep in the factory after Sehri. The fire trapped him, and he couldn’t escape the smoke,” Rudra said.

Fire Service authorities reported seven businesses gutted but could not yet confirm the fire’s cause or the financial loss.

CMCH Director Brig Gen Md Taslim Uddin said, “Two people were brought dead from the Terry Bazar fire. They did not have external burns, but their windpipes were completely burnt.”