I’m still haunted by Tup Tup Resort inferno 

I recalled that my friend Ima were getting ready to leave after Fajr prayers when our friend Nasrin woke up. I asked her to come with us. But she replied, “You go ahead. I want to sleep. I’ll come downstairs for breakfast later.” Breakfast was scheduled to be served between 7:30am and 8:00am.

Ima and I then left the resort, while Nasrin stayed behind, locked the door and went back to sleep. We spent quite some time by the sea before returning to the resort at around 7:15am to 7:16am. A security guard was sitting there. I stopped to wash my feet, while Ima had already gone ahead. I followed her shortly afterwards.

As Ima and I were about to go upstairs, she noticed sparks coming from a wooden section behind a chair at the reception desk. “Fire! Fire!” Ima immediately shouted. I started screaming too. Ima rushed to call the caretaker, and I followed her, shouting repeatedly, “Why is nobody here? Where is everyone? There’s a fire!”

The caretaker was outside. After hearing us, he ran to alert the other staff members. Three or four staff members then arrived with fire extinguishers. However, they initially struggled to remove the safety pin. Another staff member eventually managed to open one.

All the while, Ima kept urging them to evacuate the guests. “Get the guests out! My friend is upstairs. Please get her out,” she pleaded. I was shouting the same thing, begging them to rescue my friend from her room. Normally, a fire extinguisher should help put out a fire. But here, the situation took a terrifying turn.

Ima called Nasrin and then told me to dial 999, the national emergency helpline. We called from two different phones, trying to get help as quickly as possible. At around 7:18am, I was calling the Fire Service. But almost immediately after the extinguisher was used, an explosion occurred. Everything happened in the blink of an eye.

I kept screaming, “Please get my friend out of her room! I think she has lost consciousness. Please rescue her. She is in that room!”
The caretaker and the other staff members fled the scene. After that, we could not see them anywhere. I was still on the phone with the Fire Service, trying to explain the location. Meanwhile, Ima ran around to the back of the building, hoping Nasrin might appear at a window and find a way to escape. But she never came. The curtains were drawn.


The Fire Service arrived much later. I heard that their station was quite far away. By then, the sleeping guests had been trapped in the fire. We stayed there throughout the day, waiting for our friend.

Everything was destroyed before our eyes. We remained at the scene until the rescue operation was completed, searching through the debris in the hope of finding her. But there was no way to tell whether she was there. Everything had been reduced to ashes.

Afterwards, we went to the district hospital, hoping against hope that she might be among the survivors. But she was nowhere to be found. That night, we went to the morgue.
The writer is a lawyer and witness of the incident