The death toll from the building collapse near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka continued to creep steadily higher on Friday, rising to 285, as rescuers kept up their grim search for survivors trapped in the ruined structure.
About sixty people were recovered alive from the wreckage Friday morning and rushed to hospital, the national news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) reported citing police.
But hundreds more were feared to still be trapped inside the pile of rubble, over which the stench of death hovered.
The collapse Wednesday of the eight-story building, which housed garment workers who had been told to report for duty despite cracks appearing in the structure a daily earlier, has stirred anger in Bangladesh over lax safety standards in the country's key industry.
Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Dhaka to protest the safety problems.
Officials coordinating the rescue operation have said the painstaking efforts to find survivors amid the mound of broken concrete and twisted metal would go on until Saturday morning, 72 hours after the building caved in. After that, heavy equipment will be used to retrieve the bodies still inside.
By Friday afternoon, the number of confirmed deaths from the disaster had reached 285, according to the police control room at the scene. Around 2,000 people have been rescued, many of them badly injured.
Authorities have said they don't yet know what caused the collapse in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, or exactly how many people remain encased inside the mound of debris.
Rescuers were dropping food and bottles of water into chambers in the wreckage where people were trapped.
The building housed several garment factories, which were believed to employ about 2,500 workers, a bank and a shopping mall.
Unlike the garment factory workers, the bank employees had been told not to report for work on Wednesday because of the concerns about the structure. And the shops in the mall were closed because of a strike.
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