The MV Rashi, a 32,000-ton former liquefied natural gas carrier, was already mostly gone by Friday morning. About 80% of the vessel had been cut apart at Ferdous Steel Ship Recycling Industries, a yard on the coast of Bhatiary in Sitakunda, the center of Bangladesh’s sprawling shipbreaking industry.
What remained was still dangerous.
At about 8:30 am, workers made a circular cut around a tank inside the vessel. Roughly 10 minutes later, as they returned to open the section, two men collapsed. Others rushed toward them and fell, too. Within minutes, what had begun as a routine cutting job had become one of the deadliest accidents in Bangladesh’s shipbreaking industry in years.
Nine workers died after being exposed to toxic gas.
The accident occurred at a yard described as a “green shipyard,” part of an industry that has spent years trying to shed its reputation for dangerous working conditions and adapt to international standards.
But accounts from workers, rescuers, relatives and government officials point to familiar problems of hazardous work carried out without sufficient precautions, questions over gas-free certification, inadequate emergency arrangements and workers summoned on a weekly holiday.
They also raise a more disturbing question: whether some of the men might have survived had help reached them sooner.
“There was no ambulance and no proper safety arrangement,” Nazim Uddin, a local resident who joined the rescue effort, told Daily Waadaa. “Local residents paid from their own pockets to send everyone to hospital.”
Friday was supposed to be a holiday at the yard. But 34 workers had been brought in, according to workers and people familiar with the operation, who said they had been pressured by management to report for duty.
Shubho Das, one of the workers present, said the danger became apparent only after the cutting had begun.
“About 10 minutes later, when workers went there to open the hole completely, two of them first collapsed unconscious,” he Waadaa. “Two more were injured while trying to rescue them. Then the cutting foreman went forward and collapsed.”
The yard’s safety officer, Abdul Alim Sujan, 36, put on a mask and entered the area, Das said. He, too, collapsed.
“While trying to pull one of them out from a distance using a hook, I was also affected by the gas and fell unconscious in the mud,” Das said. Sujan was among those who died.
So were Mansur Ali, 55, and his younger brother Nasir Uddin, 51. Nasir, a cutter, was overcome by the gas first. Mansur, a foreman, went in after him. Neither came out alive.
Their relatives said the deaths were compounded by what happened afterward.
“They tried to hide the bodies of my husband and my brother-in-law Mansur by leaving them in the mud,” Nasir’s wife, Anwara Begum, told Waadaa.
Mansur’s daughter, Runa Akter, said her father had repeatedly been called to work despite Friday being his day off.
“They kept calling my father even on a holiday, made him come to work and killed him,” she told Waadaa. “There is no one left to look after us. We want justice.”
Nazim Uddin, the local resident, said news of the accident did not reach people outside the yard for more than an hour.
“Everyone goes to work at 7 am. The incident happened at 8 am, but we only heard about it at 9:30,” he told Waadaa. “Guards had been stationed near the gate and the injured were kept inside instead of being sent to hospital in time. We forced our way in and saw six bodies.”
Among the dead was Palash Das, 35, from Suni Thakur Jelepara. He had married about a year earlier. His wife, Bhumika Das, is eight months pregnant.
“They did not try to save the workers,” she said, “If they had taken him to the hospital in time, perhaps my husband could have been saved.”
The other workers killed were Sunny Das, 23; Habibur Rahman, 51; Rana Mia, 23; Khokon Mia, 23; and Matiur Rahman, 19.
For Sitakunda, their deaths belong to a much longer record.
The coastal industrial belt north of Chattogram is one of the world’s major centers for dismantling end-of-life ships. Vessels that once carried oil, gas, cargo and passengers arrive on the beaches and are reduced section by section into reusable steel and machinery.
The industry supplies raw materials to Bangladesh’s steel sector and provides thousands of jobs. It has also killed workers with grim regularity.
Data compiled by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, or BILS, show 16 shipbreaking workers died in 2015, followed by 18 in 2016, 19 in 2017, 13 in 2018 and 23 in 2019. Ten died in 2020, nine in 2021, seven each in 2022 and 2023, one in 2024 and four in 2025. Another three workers had died by June this year, before the nine deaths at Ferdous Steel.
Hundreds more have been injured. BILS has recorded 239 serious injuries involving falling steel plates, explosions and other accidents associated with dismantling ships.
The statistics describe an industry in which catastrophic accidents are not aberrations but recurring events.
Shipbreaking yards typically do not employ all dismantling workers directly. Much of the cutting is handled through contractors, creating layers of responsibility between yard owners and the men performing some of the most hazardous work.
Labour advocates say contractors have strong incentives to complete dismantling quickly and cheaply, sometimes at the expense of basic safety procedures and protective equipment.
Government instructions prohibit ship cutting after 8 pm, intended in part to reduce accidents during late-night work. Workers and labour advocates say the restriction is frequently ignored.
At Ferdous Steel, a work schedule displayed on an office wall offered another glimpse into the yard’s operations. Workers were divided into three groups, with shifts stretching from 9 am until 9 am the next day. Friday was listed as the weekly holiday.
Yet workers were inside the vessel that Friday morning.
The accident has also put renewed scrutiny on Bangladesh’s growing number of environmentally certified shipbreaking facilities. Sitakunda now has 23 yards developed to comply with requirements associated with the International Maritime Organization’s Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships.
Such certification is intended to improve how ships are dismantled and hazardous materials are managed. Friday’s deaths showed that environmental compliance and worker safety can be very different measures of what makes a shipyard “green.”
Md Toufikul Islam Bhuiyan, assistant director of the Fire Service in Chattogram, said the vessel’s history as an LNG carrier should have prompted particular caution.
“This was an LNG-carrying vessel,” he told Waadaa. “Some of the tanks could have contained fluorine, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide. The yard authorities sent workers to cut the tank without making it gas-free. Their safety arrangements were also extremely poor.”
The role of the Department of Explosives is also under scrutiny.
“There was gross negligence by the Department of Explosives in this incident,” Mintu Fazlul Kabir, a BILS coordinator, told Waadaa. “Had they properly supervised the work beforehand, these nine lives would not have been lost in this way.”
The department has offered a more complicated account.
Talking with Waadaa, SM Sakhawat Hossain, an assistant inspector at its Chattogram office, said that investigators were examining whether hydrogen sulphide, ammonia or carbon monoxide had accumulated inside smaller enclosed chambers of the ship.
Gas-free certificates, he said, had been issued for the main cargo and engine compartments.
The distinction could become central to determining how workers were sent into a space containing enough toxic gas to kill them.
Ferdous Steel rejected allegations that it had failed to provide adequate safety measures.
“There was no shortage in our safety arrangements,” Mahiuddin, a representative of the company, told Waadaa. “Since it was Friday, there were no operational activities, which caused some delay in the rescue effort.”
He said the accident occurred when members of the safety team went to test gas inside the tank. The vessel, he added, had arrived at the yard about a year earlier and had received a gas-free certificate.
That account appears difficult to reconcile with workers’ descriptions of cutting being carried out before the men collapsed, and investigators are now examining the sequence of events.
The response inside the yard after the deaths has generated further questions.
Representatives of the owners were seen handing envelopes containing money to journalists. Asked about the payments, Ariful Hasan Nayan, another representative of the owners, told Waadaa that reporters who had not received food were instead given 2,000 taka each.
Outside, anger was spreading. Local residents entered the yard and vandalised parts of the facility. An army team later cordoned off the area, restored order and worked to contain gas leaking from the vessel.
At Chattogram Medical College Hospital, another problem emerged: some families did not want autopsies performed.
For poor households dependent on shipbreaking wages, pursuing a case against a large industrial company can appear more threatening than accepting compensation and returning home with the body.
“We do not want a post-mortem,” Angur Ali, a relative of Khokon Mia, told Waadaa. “We cannot fight a case against such a big company. We have to take the body and be satisfied with whatever compensation they give us.”
Hospital officials urged families not to make that decision too quickly.
“The relatives of the deceased were reluctant to have post-mortems conducted,” Brigadier General Mohammad Taslim Uddin, director of Chattogram Medical College Hospital, told Waadaa.
“But we explained how important post-mortems are for securing their legal rights and receiving assistance, and we are handing over the bodies following the proper procedures,” he added.
By Friday night, only one body had undergone a post-mortem and been released to relatives, according to Kadom Ali, a morgue attendant at the hospital.
The company has said it will pay 10 lakh taka to the family of each worker killed. Nazmul Islam, secretary of the Bangladesh Ship Breakers and Recyclers Association, told Waadaa that the association would assist the families in obtaining compensation from Ferdous Steel.
The government has promised investigations and possible prosecution.
Finance Minister Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury visited injured workers and relatives of the dead at Chattogram Medical College Hospital after the accident.
“The government will provide financial assistance,” he said. “We will thoroughly investigate whether there were any failures in safety measures or compliance with regulations, and strict legal action will be taken against those responsible.”
Abdul Quddus Chowdhury, the deputy inspector general of police for the Chattogram Range, told Waadaa that criminal proceedings would be initiated if investigators established negligence.
Deputy Commissioner Mohammad Zahidul Islam Miah said the district administration had formed a nine-member committee to investigate. The Bangladesh Ship Breakers and Recyclers Association has announced a separate inquiry.
For the families though, those investigations will unfold after the funerals.
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