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A Bangladesh court has ordered two garment factory owners and 11 others to stand trial for the deaths of 111 workers in the country’s worst industrial fire.
Delwar Hossain and his wife, Mahmuda Akter, were formally charged over the 2012 blaze, which tore through the Tazreen factory on Dhaka’s outskirts, trapping workers who made clothes for western retailers.
“The court charged the 13 including Delwar and his wife with causing death by negligence,” the prosecutor Khandakar Abdul Mannan said outside the district court in Dhaka.
“The judge ordered a trial from 1 October when witness testimonies will be recorded,” he said.
The November 2012 fire shone an international spotlight on appalling conditions in Bangladesh’s $25bn (£16.4bn) garment industry.
The blaze was followed by an even bigger tragedy less than 12 months later, when the nine-storey Rana Plaza garment complex collapsed, killing 1,138 people.
Mannan said the 13 charged over the blaze, who also include factory managers and security guards, face a maximum of 10 years in jail if convicted.
Eight of those charged, including the owners, were present in court on Thursday, but the five others were still on the run, he said.
Deadly accidents are common in Bangladesh’s 4,500 garment factories, which are a mainstay of the impoverished country’s economy. Factory owners, however, rarely face charges.
Tazreen, in the Ashulia industrial district, supplied clothes to international brands including Walmart, C&A and Enyce, a label owned by the US rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Hossain, the factory’s managing director, and Akter, its chair, were accused of breaching building regulations, including unsafe stairwells, in the nine-storey complex.
The pair have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyer could not be contacted for comment.
Kalpona Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, welcomed the trial, saying it would send “a clear message to errant entrepreneurs who overlook safety issues in their factories”.
“It’s possibly the first time that the owners of a garment plant are being tried for their roles in the deaths of workers in a factory fire,” she said.
“Unfortunately the government’s factory inspectors, who had a huge role in the tragedy, were not indicted for the crime.”
State inspectors, whose role is to ensure factory safety, avoided charges despite accusations by worker rights groups that they allowed the owners to operate without regular monitoring.
Victims of the fire, mostly women who were paid as little as $37 (£24) a month, were overcome by smoke. The factory gates were locked and they were forced to jump from windows on upper floors, police said.
Some managers and security guards insisted that workers return to their duties even though smoke was billowing from the ground floor where the fire started, according to a police report.
The Rana Plaza collapse in April 2013 and other disasters prompted sweeping reforms, including new safety inspections and higher wages in the industry, which employs around 4 million people.
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