The fire at Aswad Composite Mills in Gazipur was an accident, not an act of sabotage, the owner of the factory said yesterday.

The fire originated in the chimney of a heating machine, said Nafis Sikder, managing director of Palmal Group, the owning company of the factory.

"However, the way the fire spread across

the entire factory was mysterious. It spread in only 15 minutes," Nafis said at a press conference at BGMEA office in Dhaka.

Separate probe teams of the government and the garment makers' trade body are working to find out the cause of the fire that claimed seven lives on Tuesday night.

Nafis said they are yet to assess the losses and will try to reopen the factory as soon as possible.

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The buyers have expressed condolence but did not make any negative gesture after the fire, he said.

Each of the deceased will getTk 5 lakh as compensation from the company and another Tk 2 lakh will come from an insurance scheme of the BGMEA, Nafis said.

Palmal Group has already paid Tk 50,000 to the relatives of each of the dead victims and the rest Tk 4.50 lakh will be paid soon, he said.

"My company will bear all the costs of treatment for the injured workers."

At the press conference, BGMEA President Atiqul Islam said such an accident just before the annual extravaganza of apparel exporters that begins today will send a negative signal to the retailers.

The BGMEA probe committee will submit its report soon, he added.

In the last two years, Aswad shipped dozens of containers to customers including Hudson's Bay and Loblaws, according to ImportGenius.com. The Wall Street Journal reported Aswad had produced clothes for Wal-Mart.

Loblaws has seen documents that suggest some suppliers may have outsourced production against company policy, spokeswoman Julija Hunter said in an e-mailed statement. The retailer has a "notolerance policy" over unauthorised outsourcing and is investigating, Hunter said, adding that Loblaws is confident it has not placed any orders from Aswad, according to a Bloomberg report.

Loblaws in May announced its commit-

ment to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and said at the time it would stay in Bangladesh.

Hudson's Bay said its last order was placed with Aswad in October 2012 for delivery in April 2013. “We had determined at that time that we would not be placing subsequent orders with Aswad," Tiffany Bourre, a spokeswoman for the Torontobased company, said in an e-mailed statement.

H&M does not have any direct business relationship with Aswad, though the plant delivers fabric to a factory that is used by the Swedish retailer, it said in a statement.

It was in 1984, when Bangladesh was on the cusp of a garment export boom, that visionary entrepreneur Nurul Haque Sikder, father of Nafis, started the Palmal Group.

An engineer by training, Nurul Haque started small, with a modest factory at the capital's Eskaton area. At present, it has 27 production units and a staff count of 25,000 - and is counted among the country's leading garment exporters.

Headquartered in the city’s Gulshan area, the group mainly supplies knitted garment products to upscale Western brands, according to Nafis, who took over the company in 2001 after his father died in 2009.

"Our exports have been growing at 15 percent every year, owing to our superlative quality and production standards,” he said. The group's annual exports stand at $250 million. Nafis said 1,000 workers were employed in the three affected units.