By Brett Stolpestad
At least 112 people perished Saturday and Sunday after a fire engulfed a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Washington Post reported.
The fire at the eight-story factory, Tazreen Fashions, started at about 7 p.m. on Saturday. It took firefighters all night to put the fire out, the New York Times reported.
The fire department operations director, Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, told the Associated Press that 12 people had died in hospitals after jumping from the building to escape the flames, the Washington Post reported.
According to officials, the factory did not have a sufficient amount of emergency exits, the Washington Post reported. The Bangladesh garment industry has become notorious for its poor safety conditions. According to an anti-sweatshop advocate group in Amsterdam, there have been almost 500 Bangladeshi victims in other factory fires since 2006, the New York Times reported.
Experts say that industrial disasters like this could have been easily avoided if factories would have taken proper safety precautions, the New York Times reported.
Tazreen Fashions Ltd., which makes products for Wal-Mart and other European and U.S. companies, had received a "high-risk" safety rating by a Wal-Mart "ethical sourcing" assessor in May of last year, the Washington Post reported.
The cause of the fire was not immediately determined by officials, the Washington Post reported.
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