Son burnt to death in front of parents

Moazzem Hossain Nannu and Shahina Hossain were fast asleep in their room when a loud bang jolted their entire house around 5am, followed by bellows of “Fire! Help!” from their son in the next room.

Swapnil Ahmed Piash (24) had come home a few hours ago, handed the car keys to his mother and gone to his room in their 10th-floor flat in Aftabnagar.

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“There were smoke all around, as fire engulfed my son’s room. We told him to come out from his room, but he could not. Failing to unlock the door, he took shelter in balcony and screamed for help. From the next balcony, I was trying to help my son… but he was trapped,” said an inconsolable Nannu at Dhaka Medical College Hospital yesterday after losing his only son.

“Fire had already caught on my son’s body. Piash took off his clothes. I tried to break the door of his room, but could not,” Nannu said.

He brought three fire extinguishers to the balcony, and sprayed them towards his son’s balcony to douse the blaze.

“When I was about to take the fourth extinguisher, the electricity of the building went off… After 10 or 15 minutes, I could not hear Piash’s screams anymore,” said the sobbing father, adding that he passed out while trying to leave his balcony.

Nannu, a former general secretary of Crime Reporters Association of Bangladesh who now works at Global TV, was hurt on his head and fell sick after inhaling smoke.

Half an hour into the incident, five firefighting units rushed to the spot and doused the fire, but all could they recover was Piash’s body  from the balcony, said Abul Kalam Azad, senior station officer of Fire Service and Civil Defence Station in Baridhara.

“The fire might have originated from a short-circuit,” said the fire official.

Piash recently graduated from a private university and started an electronics business, family members said adding that he stored some of those items in the room.

With police permission, the family took his body from the morgue without autopsy. Piash would be buried at their ancestral home in Abhaynagar of Jashore.