Blasts suspected to be caused by a ruptured gas pipeline sparked a fire in a hotel in the Bangladeshi capital, injuring at least 45 people, authorities said yesterday.
Officers were investing the explosions that occurred late on Sunday at Hotel Orchard, a 12-floor building in central Dhaka, senior police official Mrinal Kanti Saha said.
‘Not a bomb"
“We are still trying to find what has happened,” Saha told reporters at the scene, adding that there had not yet been any evidence of a bomb.
Another security official, Mahbub Islam, said he suspected the blasts were caused by a leak in a gas pipeline.
“We are checking the whole place. Bomb or gas, it’s a serious incident and we are taking it seriously from a security point of view,” a senior police official said.
The fire engulfed three floors of the hotel, Saha said.
Firefighters were called out to douse the blaze and rescue hotel guests, many of them awakened by the explosions.
The injured included two Sri Lanka nationals who were staying at the hotel, Saha said. One of them was identified as A.R. Samaltilak, a visiting official from Sri Lanka’s Commercial Bank of Ceylon, in whose room the first explosion occurred at 9:30pm, Saha said.
A fire ensued after the first explosion, followed by two more blasts a few hours later, shattering glass windows and tossing furniture and refrigerators into the streets from the 6th and the 7th floors.
Samaltilak reportedly told police officers that the first blast occurred in his 6th floor room when he lit a cigarette before going to bed, Saha said.
Injured
Samaltilak was being treated at a Dhaka hospital for severe burn injuries, Saha said. He gave no details about the second injured Sri Lankan.
He said many of the injured suffered burns and were given first aid treatment. Others were injured by glass shrapnel.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS