“Those kids are my kids too,” Mahreen Chowdhury told her husband as she lay dying in hospital.
Just hours earlier, the teacher had been standing at the entrance to Milestone School and College in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, preparing to hand the second- to fifth-grade students over to their parents.
But in a split second, what had been an unremarkable Monday lunchtime turned to horror.
A Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into a two-storey building, bursting into flames.
Chowdhury – realising there were students still in the building’s classrooms – ran back into the burning wreckage.
“I did my best to pull out about 20 to 25 people – as much as I could,” Chowdhury’s husband Mansur Helal recalls her saying, moments before she was put on ventilation at the intensive care unit of Dhaka’s National Burn Institute. “I don’t know what happened after that.”
Chowdhury died later on Monday: in the process of rescuing the children, she had suffered burns to almost 100% of her body.
She was among the at least 31 people killed in the accident – 25 of whom are children.
