By Ruma Paul
DHAKA (Reuters) -When a Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into her school and erupted in a fireball on Monday, Maherin Chowdhury rushed to save some of the hundreds of students and teachers facing mortal danger, placing their safety before her own.
The 46-year-old English teacher went back again and again into a burning classroom to rescue her students, even as her own clothes were engulfed in flames, her brother, Munaf Mojib Chowdhury, told Reuters by telephone.
Maherin died on Monday after suffering near total burns on her body. She is survived by her husband and two teenaged 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?'” Chowdhury said.
At least 29 people, most of them children, were killed when the F-7 BGI crashed into the school, trapping them in fire and debris. The military said the aircraft had 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,” he said, adding that he found out about his sister’s act of bravery when he visited the hospital and met students she had 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 ran to save others,” Khadija Akter, the headmistress of the school’s primary section, told Reuters on phone about Maherin.
She was buried on Tuesday in her home district of Nilphamari, in northern Bangladesh.
(Reporting by Ruma Paul in Dhaka, Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar, Editing by William Maclean)
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