The number of casualty rose to 21 with another dead body recovered yesterday. The victim was Identified as Nazrul Islam Nazu, 35, who was working on aluminium fittings on the ground floor of the multi-storey building during the disaster on Saturday morning.

"More than 75 hours have passed since the building collapsed and now the chance of anyone surviving in this heat seems very thin," fire brigade Deputy Director Selim Newaz Bhuiyan told The Daily Star yesterday.

"But of course we are still continuing our search. Miracles often happen--people may still be found alive inside the wreckage," he said, adding that they will not give up hope until clearing the entire rubble of the 20,000-square-foot building.

Sources said 40 percent of the rescue work was completed until yesterday afternoon. Officials of the army and fire brigade who are supervising the rescue operation said they would need at most four days to clear the rubble.

"The operation would have taken less time if we could have advanced from all four sides. We are at work only from east and south sides of the building as we cannot take the excavators and other large equipment to the two other sides," Brigadier General Nizam Ahmed, head of the rescue operation, told The Daily Star yesterday.

The Phoenix building that previously housed a garment factory collapsed on Saturday when labourers were working for its conversion into a 500-bed hospital.

Some injured workers recovered from the debris told The Daily Star that the building failed to carry the load of the whole structure as the authorities removed several walls from the ground floor to make a large hall room.

Construction experts, engineers, Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkho (Rajuk) officials and the six members of the probe body investigating the accident also made similar observations.

Over 500 army personnel and fire fighters have been carrying out the operation since the collapse, drilling through the floors of the collapsed building to reach the ground floor.

Brigadier Nizam said, "We have reached the ground floor at some points while our men are working on the first and second floors at other sides."

The firefighters were seen pumping oxygen into the wreckage and asking any survivor on loudspeakers to call out for help.

Meanwhile, no one turned up until last evening to identify the two bodies kept at the Dhaka Medical College morgue since Saturday.

The bodies of a woman, aged around 45, and a man, 30, started decomposing on Monday. Doctors said the bodies are decomposing fast as they have been kept without any refrigeration--which the morgue lacks--and soon it would be difficult to identify them.

The hospital authorities have decided to hand over the bodies to Anjuman Mufidul Islam today for burial.

The detectives who are investigating the case filed in connection with the building collapse failed to arrest any of the seven absconding accused, including owner of the building Deen Mohammad.

The police arrested accused manager (finance) of Phoenix Fabrics Rezaul Karim Faruq on Saturday night.

Detective Branch (DB) officials told The Daily Star that they raided several points in Dhaka but did not find any of the accused. "Two DB teams have gone out of Dhaka today to raid their possible hideouts and village homes," a DB officer said yesterday, seeking anonymity.

Confusion over

building height

The chief engineer of Rajuk, who maintained until Monday that the building was six-storey high, told yesterday that it was a five and a half-storey building with a tin-shed structure on the roof.

A display board at the army information centre described the building as five-storeyed. Brigadier Nizam, who is coordinating the rescue operations, told The Daily Star that the building was four-storey high with the tin-shed structure on the fifth floor.

Fire brigade Director (operation and maintenance) Zahir Uddin Mohammad Babar also said it was four-storey high with the makeshift structure of corrugated tin on the top floor.