A devastating fire killed dozens at a container depot in southeastern Bangladesh this weekend. It's not the first such disaster in the country. Experts say corruption and lax enforcement are to blame.

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While firefighters have been praised for their heroic efforts to put out the fire in Sitakunda, experts pointed out that the incident again showed that the country's fire department lacks the human resources and modern equipment needed to deal with such a situation.

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Barrister Jyotirmoy Barua, a legal expert who has investigated other fires in his country, believes that the explosions at the container depot worsened due to a lack of information about the stockpile of chemicals there.

"The firefighters were not informed about what was stored in the containers," Barua told DW. "Therefore, they have spread water on inflammable chemicals, which aggravated the situation. They could have used foam and sand to stop the fire instead."

Authorities later said that there were more than 4,000 containers at the depot, of which about 1,000 were filled with hazardous materials, including chemicals.

Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, thinks that the disaster at the depot could have been easily avoided with proper safety measures.

"After a disaster of such scale, systems and administrations are expected to take lessons and rectify [the situation]. Bangladesh regrettably hasn't taken any lessons from the past," the lawyer told DW. 

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"It is nothing but sheer lack of responsibility and accountability that leads to such deadly incidents," Hasan added.

Legal expert Jyotirmoy Barua doesn't consider such incidents to be accidents because when an incident is declared an accident and unintentional, victims are left with very little room to find justice in the country's legal system, he says.

"If we go through the patterns of those deadly incidents, it becomes clear that owners were already aware of what could happen if a fire breaks out in their factories," Barua told DW. 

"That's why we call it an act of 'systematic killing' as the term gives the victims a chance to file murder cases against the perpetrators," he said. "We were able to file two murder cases in the past after two industrial disasters. Trials have been going on in those cases.”

However, he admitted that in most incidents, perpetrators remain unpunished due to the corruption in different sectors, lax enforcement and a culture of impunity.

"The owners of these industries are so powerful that many forces come together to save them after an incident. They hardly face any justice due to their influence over political and other sectors of the country," he added.

"An investigation was launched to determine the reason behind the blaze [in Sitakunda]," Asaduzzaman Khan, Bangladesh's home minister, told reporters in Dhaka.

"Those responsible for the accident will be brought to justice," he added.

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