Rescue crews working through the rubble at the Bangladesh building collapse site scurried to extract a woman found alive in the wreckage on Friday. She reportedly was pleading, "'m alive. Please rescue me."
The discovery of the woman comes 17 days after a building in a Bangladesh complex with factories full of garment workers caved in. It was South Asia's deadliest industrial disaster. Recovery workers search through the nine-story building's wreckage in Savar, a suburb of the capital, Dhaka.
During the first several days of dangerous and painstaking work, they got more than 2,400 people out of the rubble alive. Friday's discovery of the woman in the rubble was the first in the last 18 days.
"We know that there is a living body in the collapse," said Capt. Ibrahim Islam, a Bangladeshi military official outside the collapse site.
The past 11 days have focused on the grim task of retrieving dead bodies still buried in the heap of broken concrete, many of them so severely decomposed that authorities struggle to identify them.
As more bodies were recovered on Friday, the total number of people confirmed dead rose to 1,039, said Maj. Zihadul Islam, a fire service official.
The owners of the building and the factories are under investigation over accusations they ordered workers to enter the premises on the day of the collapse despite cracks in the structure the day before.
The Bangladeshi government has faced criticism for failing to improve the lax safety standards in the country's thousands of garment factories where millions of people work, news reports said.
The Savar building collapse happened five months after a fire at a garment factory near Dhaka killed more than 100 people. And on Wednesday, eight people died in a fire at another factory in the Dhaka area.
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