A teacher is being praised for her bravery after losing her life saving students when a Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into her school and erupted in a fireball.
Maherin Chowdhury, a 46-year-old English teacher, went back again and again into a burning classroom to rescue her students on Monday when Bangladesh air guard’s F-7BJI crashed into a school trapping them in fire and debris.
Even as her own clothes were engulfed in flames, she continued, her brother, Munaf Mojib Chowdhury, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.
Ms Chowdhury died on Monday after suffering near-total burns to her body.
She is survived by her husband and two teenage sons.
“When her husband called her, pleading with her to leave the scene and think of her children, she refused, saying, ‘They are also my children. They are burning. How can I leave them?'” Mr Chowdhury said.
At least 29 people, most of them children, were killed in the incident.
The military said the aircraft suffered mechanical failure.
“I don’t know exactly how many she saved, but it may have been at least 20. She pulled them out with her own hands,”
Mr Chowdhury said.
He added that he found out about his sister’s act of bravery when he visited the hospital and met students she rescued.
The jet had taken off from a nearby air base on a routine training mission, the military said.
After experiencing mechanical failure, the pilot tried to divert the aircraft away from populated areas, but it crashed into the campus.
The pilot was among those killed.
“When the plane crashed and fire broke out, everyone was running to save their lives. She [Ms Chowdhury] ran to save others,” Khadija Akter, the headmistress of the school’s primary section, told Reuters.
She was buried on Tuesday in her home district of Nilphamari, in northern Bangladesh.
Students from the school and others from nearby colleges protested as two government officials visited the crash site. The students demanded an accurate death toll and shouted: “Why did our brothers die? We demand answers!”
Elsewhere in the capital, hundreds of protesting students, some of them waving sticks, broke through the main gate of the federal government secretariat, demanding the resignation of the education adviser, according to local TV footage.
Witnesses said police with batons charged towards them, fired tear gas and used sound grenades to disperse the crowd, leaving dozens injured.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Talebur Rahman said the officers had to use tear gas to disperse the protesters.
He said he did not have information about the number of injured.
The protesting students called for those killed and injured to be named, the decommissioning of what they said were old and risky jets, and a change in air force training procedures.
A statement from the press office of Bangladesh’s interim administrator said the government, the military, school and hospital authorities were working together to publish a list of victims.
It also said the air force would be told not to operate training aircraft in populated areas.
The F-7 BGI is the final variant in China’s Chengdu J-7/F-7 aircraft family, according to Jane’s Information Group, an open-source intelligence company.
Bangladesh signed a contract for 16 aircraft in 2011 and deliveries were completed by 2013.
The Chengdu F-7 is the licence-built version of the Soviet era MiG-21.
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