Fire officers rescue an injured individual from the particles of a industrial constructing after an explosion, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tuesday.

Abdul Goni/AP

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Fire officers rescue an injured individual from the particles of a industrial constructing after an explosion, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tuesday.

Abdul Goni/AP

MUMBAI, India — It felt like an earthquake. That’s what shopkeeper Safayet Hossain told local media after an explosion blew out the first two floors of a multistory industrial constructing Tuesday in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

The blast was close to his store within the metropolis’s outdated quarter. He mentioned he noticed 20 to 25 folks mendacity within the highway in entrance of the broken constructing.

“They were crying for help. ‘Save us, save us,'” he mentioned. Footage from the scene exhibits firefighters carrying burn victims out of the wreckage on stretchers.

At least 14 people were killed, and greater than 100 had been injured. Officials say the dying toll is more likely to rise.

The blast hit simply earlier than 5 p.m. native time, the tip of the work day, in a constructing that homes a plumbing provide store and different companies in a busy industrial district. Electricity was severed for a metropolis block in both path, and police cordoned off streets.

Officials say they’re investigating the reason for the blast, and {that a} bomb squad is on the scene. One official told reporters at a close-by hospital that it seemed to be an accident. In the previous 48 hours, there have been two other blasts blamed on gasoline leaks within the metropolis.

Onlookers collect outdoors the location of the explosion at a industrial constructing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tuesday.

AP

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Onlookers collect outdoors the location of the explosion at a industrial constructing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tuesday.

AP

Fire and constructing security can usually be shoddy in Bangladesh. It was residence to one of many world’s deadliest industrial disasters, the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed greater than 1,100 folks. Hundreds die in fires in Dhaka alone annually.

Earlier this week, a large fireplace at a cluster of Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh left some 12,000 homeless, in keeping with the United Nations.

Rescuers at Tuesday’s blast website in Dhaka reportedly needed to pause their work and evacuate the wreckage at one level, when somebody noticed a crack in a help wall.