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A miraculous escape
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upazila around 10:30am.
Within a few hours, social media was flooded with pictures and videos of the incident.
Musa Ahmed, his Dubai expatriate son-in-law Abu Bakkar, granddaughters – Adila Akhter, 6, and Adina Akhter, 3 – and their driver were inside the flattened car for nearly 35 minutes before they were able to return from the jaws of death.
Speaking to reporters at the Chittagong Medical College Hospital (CMCH), Musa said, “We thought our time had come. The children were crying for help, while the rest of us were yelling out to the pedestrians to help us. It was Allah who saved us with his own hands.
“Fire service officials arrived after around 30-35 minutes and began their operation to pull us out of the wreckage.”
Belal Uddin Jahangir, officer-in-charge of Baro Awlia Highway Police Station, told The Daily Star, “The heavy-weight but empty container was heading towards KDS factory in the port city’s Nasirabad Industrial Area. The trailer carrying the container got detached from the lorry and fell onto the car, smashing it completely.
“When our police team rushed to the spot, we thought everyone was dead as the car was badly smashed. But the moment we heard the cries of children, we didn’t wait for a second to begin our operation to rescue them.”
Firefighters from Kumira Fire Station, nearly 20km from the accident spot, arrived around 11:00am. Before that, locals tried placing logs, stones, and iron rods under the container so that it was slightly lifted from the car.
Sultan Mahmud, the fire station officer, said, “When we saw the situation, we never imagined they could be alive. We thought our plan of action was to remove the trailer and pull out the car with dead bodies inside. But then we heard the voices and changed our plan.
“Using police wreckers and then a crane, we lifted a corner of the container and dragged the car out from underneath it. We then proceeded to pull out the survivors one by one. The two children were scared but unscathed.”
They were all taken to CMCH for observation, he added.
Police took the car and the lorry into custody for legal action, OC Belal said.
On May 10, in a similar accident, a father and son were killed after a container fell from a running lorry on their rickshaw in Patenga.

Tagore
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Jorasanko mansion in Kolkata.
The “Bard of Bengal” composed over 2,000 songs which created a separate genre, known as “Tagore songs”.
He also wrote eight novels, 84 short stories and numerous poems in his prolific literary career spanned over almost seven decades. Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire are his best-known works.
Rabindranath became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: Bangladesh’s “Amar Shonar Bangla” and India’s “Jana Gana Mana”.
State-run Bangladesh Television and Bangladesh Betar and private television and radio stations will air special programmes on the occasion of the day.