Zihad brought dead from black hole
Finally it was all over. The hopes transformed into a tragedy after 23 hours of anxiety when the three-and a-half year old Zihad was brought dead to the surface from deep inside a well on Saturday afternoon by locals and volunteers after the fire service had abandoned a rescue operation around 3:00pm.The locals and volunteers pulled up the boy in a cage after the fire service abandoned the operation and began to pack up declaring that they did not find anybody inside the narrow 300-feet deep well.The boy was rushed to Dhaka Medical College Hospital where doctors declared him dead around 3:45pm.
The locals and volunteers, frustrated by the fire service efforts since Friday evening, burst out in anger and vandalised some installations of railways at Shajahanpur after the body was recovered.DMCH emergency section residential surgeon KM Riaz Morshed said that the boy might have died a few hours ago, but details could not be given before the autopsy which would be done today.Zihad fell into the water-pump well, left abandoned by the railways, at about 3:00pm Friday while playing with other boys.Zihad’s father Nasir Uddin blamed ‘flawed’ rescue efforts by the fire service and other agencies for the death of his son.Nasir said he believed that the life of his son could have been saved if he had been reached a few hours earlier.
Locals said that the rescue had slowed after a minister made an ‘irresponsible’ statement that there was none in the well prompting the fire service to focus on finding the body. The rescuers used several methods to pull the boy up.‘Until now he [Zihad] is alive, but seems a little tired,’ Major ATM Shakil Newaz, fire service director operation, had told reporters around 10:00pm Friday.
The rescuers at first tried to pull the boy up with the help of ropes, but the attempts failed repeatedly, forcing them to use a piece of wood tied to ropes and a gunny-sack with ropes to lift the boy. They also started pulling out a two-inch diameter pipe in the well to make more space.
Confusions grew when the state minister for home, Asaduzzaman Khan, at about 2:45am Saturday declared after a borehole camera had travelled about 300 feet down the well that there was no boy trapped in the well and the entire episode might be a ‘rumour’.Afterwards, the fire service men plunged a CCTV camera into the abandoned well, but ‘did not find trace of a human being,’ said fire service officials.But the locals did not give up hope. They continued to claim that they heard screams from inside the well.
Two minor girls – Fatema and Pushpita – of the neighbourhood told New Age that they had seen three minor boys playing near the well on Friday afternoon.‘As I went to collect a shuttlecock from near the well, I heard someone scream inside the well and I called my father and some other locals. They also heard the screams,’ said Pushpita.Nasir, a security guard at Mothijheel Model School, told New Age that his son went out to play in yellow dresses on Friday afternoon.‘Moments later, two friends of Zihad came to me and told me that he has fallen into a water-pump well. I went to the spot and locals said that they had heard someone scream,’ said Nasir.
The locals and volunteers marched in processions at Shajahanpur and in front of DMCH demanding immediate withdrawal of the junior minister for his ‘irresponsible’ remarks about the incident.Amid confusions, police picked up Zihad’s father Nasiruddin and took him to Shajahanpur police station in the morning ‘for information’, said inspector Abdul Mabud.Around 2:30pm, the fire service arranged a press briefing where its director general Ali Ahmed Khan formally declared the rescue operation closed saying that they had found no trace of a human being in the well after sending a closed circuit TV camera several times that plunged 280 feet deep.Asked about their Friday night’s comments that Zihad was still alive, that he had taken juice that was sent into the well and that the boy had also tried to come out with the help of the rope, the fire service chief said, ‘The rope might have got tangled with some pieces of wood which lay at the bottom. Besides, we might have mistaken the echoes of the noise on the surface for screams of the boy.’
The rescuers said that when all sophisticated and modern equipment failed to spot the boy, a simple handmade tool made by a few volunteers, eventually found him, though, it was too late.The locals, with the help of iron-made ‘catcher’, made a last-ditch attempt to pull out the boy five minutes after the fire service closed their rescue operation, and it was all over with the discovery of his body.The volunteers, some of whom also took part in the 2013 Rana Plaza rescue operation in Savar, made the ‘catcher’ with iron rods, a torch, a tripod and a cleat tied to a 600-feet rope.
Abu Bakar Siddique, a volunteer who came to the spot from Mirpur 11, said that they had repeatedly requested the fire service men since Friday night to let them try the tool, but were refused permission.
The locals plunged the tool into the well six times and finally hooked Zihad’s body to the ‘catcher’ and pulled it out.The entire operation was carried out with the help of the CC TV camera.Zihad was the youngest among three siblings.The authorities finally sealed off the well around 5:00pm two hours after the recovery of the body.
- See more at: http://newagebd.net/80799/zihad-brought-dead-from-black-hole/#sthash.xqgXN99K.dpuf
