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9 commuters burnt as bus set ablaze

Staff Correspondent
At least 10 people, including a girl, were injured when hartal supporters set a bus alight at Rayerbagh in the capital's Jatrabari yesterday.
Victims and police suspect the perpetrators were inside the bus posing as passengers and they used gun powder to torch the bus around 1:00pm. The bus was carrying about 50 passengers.
Nine of the victims suffered burn injuries ranging from 8 to 37 percent of their bodies. The other victim has had his legs peppered when he jumped out through a window to save himself.
All the burn victims were admitted to the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital. They are Abdur Rahim, Abul Kalam Azad, Abdul Mannan, Abdul Hai, Abu Bakar, GM Shubho, Tarek Ahmed, Rabeya Sultana and Khabir Uddin.
The other victim, Khalil, a rickshaw puller, also took treatment at the DMCH.
Abdur Rahim, 26, suffered highest 37 percent burns. Tarek Ahmed and Abul Kalam Azad each sustained 25 percent burns while Rabeya 11 percent, including in her face.
Rabeya was to join a government primary school as a teacher today.
"I was sitting in the front row beside the driver. Suddenly I heard people screaming. I tried to get down but I was pushed and a few people fell over me," she said.
She is the youngest of her seven siblings and her family is trying to arrange her marriage, said a family member.
"I never let my three children go out during
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hartals," said Rina Begum, mother of 18-year-old Polytechnic student Tarek.
"But today [yesterday] 1 did not notice when he went out without telling me," she said of her son who suffered 23 percent burns.
Tania Begum, wife of another victim Khabir Uddin, regrets and will perhaps always regret that she forced her husband to go buy some food.
"I had been borrowing food from a neighbour and feeding my four daughters for the last four days," she said.
She also borrowed Tk 10,000 from different people as her husband, who sells banana at Shonir Akhra market, had almost no income for the last 15 days.
"I bought some food and was going home," said Khabir, who sustained burns in hands, abdomen and back. "I heard someone screaming and tried to get down but I fell down and got trampled."
Abdul Mannan, 35, cannot remember how he jumped out of the bus through the window.
An office staff of the Islamic Foundation, he thought he would not
survive. Father of a son, Mannan is worried how the news of his 19 percent burns would affect his expecting wife.
"Are they not humans? Do they not have the fear of death?" wondered Mannan, whose one leg is polio-affected.
The father of Shuvo, who sustained 15 percent burns, blamed political parties for the incident. "Poor people like us become the victims of their politics."
Since October 27, when the first of the opposition's latest three spells of hartal began, 27 victims of arson attacks have been admitted to the DMCH burn unit.
Two of them died. They are Monir, 14, who suffered 95 percent burns when pickets set fire to the covered van he was in, and Mostafizur Rahman Mukul, an official of Biswas Group. Mukul was badly burned when hartal supporters hurled a petrol bomb at the CNG-run auto-rickshaw he was travelling by.
Conditions of several other victims are critical, doctors said, adding that most of them were having breathing problems because of inhaling black smoke of crude bombs and petrol bombs that were used in the attacks.