Abu Salay Md. Fardous: Fire tore through Manjur Khan Plaza, a market in Old Dhaka’s Chawkbazar. Five fire units responded first; ten were needed by the end. It took nearly twelve hours to bring the blaze under control as narrow lanes blocked fire engines and stockpiled plastics fed the flames. Afterward, the Fire Service’s operations director offered a familiar lament: recommendations long proposed for Old Dhaka had never been implemented, including cancelling the licenses of businesses storing chemicals in residential buildings and taking legal action against violators.

That plea obscures a central legal irony. Chawkbazar burned just two days before the first anniversary of the Shialbari tragedy in Mirpur. On 14 October 2025, a blaze at an illegal chemical warehouse and the adjacent garment factory killed 16 people. According to the Fire Service, neither building held any fire safety certification, and the factory’s roof door was bolted shut with two padlocks, cutting off escape from the smoke. As The Business Standard noted at the time, a locked roof exit had likewise trapped workers at the Hashem Foods and Beverages factory in Rupganj in July 2021, where 54 people died.

In Shialbari, there were no licences to cancel in the first place. According to workers and residents, the warehouse owner, Shah Alam, had operated Alam Traders on the site for roughly fifteen years. A Fire Service deputy director on the inquiry committee confirmed the business had no operating approval, and an inspector from the Department of Explosives stated that no chemical warehouse licences had been issued in Mirpur at all. Alam went into hiding the day of the fire and remained at large eleven days later. The resulting criminal case—filed against eight people, including Alam, for causing death by negligencewas initiated not by a regulator, but by a deceased worker’s brother.

Yet Bangladesh’s fire statute does not wait for a fatal blaze to make unlicensed storage a crime. Section 4(1) of the Fire Prevention and Extinguishing Act 2003 requires anyone using a building or place as a warehouse or workshop to obtain a licence from the Director General of the Fire Service and Civil Defence. The statute sets a clear timeline: under section 4(4), the Director General must issue or refuse the licence within 90 days of an application, depending on compliance with the Act and its rules. Operating without that licence carries a minimum sentence of three years’ imprisonment, a fine, and forfeiture of the goods inside under section 17. Section 21 imposes at least two years’ imprisonment, a fine, and forfeiture to the government for storing, processing, compressing, or sorting combustible material in breach of the Act or rules.

Neither offence requires a fire, a death, or proof of what sparked a blaze. A prosecutor needs only to establish the use of the premises and the absence of a licensematters of administrative record rather than forensic reconstruction.

The bottleneck lies in section 24. Under section 24(1), no court may take cognizance of an offence under the Act without a written complaint from the Director General or an officer authorized by him. While section 24(2) makes these offences cognizable, allowing police to arrest without a warrant, a court still cannot proceed unless the Fire Service initiates the complaint. The agency that issues the licenses is also the sole gatekeeper deciding whether a breach ever reaches a magistrate.A bereaved brother can lodge a Penal Code case for negligence after a building burn down, as happened in Mirpur. Prosecuting the warehouse before it burns belongs exclusively to the regulator.

The Bangladesh National Building Code (BNBC) 2020 exposes the same gap between paper standards and pre-fire enforcement. Part 4, Chapter 3 of the Code mandates a continuous and unobstructed means of egress from any point in a building to a designated area of refuge. A roof door secured with two padlocks violates that mandate every day the factory operates, not only on the afternoon a fire breaks out. Yet when firefighters reached the Shialbari factory, the padlocks were still intact.

Closing this gap requires no new legislation. Section 24(1) already empowers the Director General to delegate the authority to file complaints. By granting station-level officers standing authorisation to lodge complaints whenever inspections uncover an unlicensed warehouse or a padlocked exit, the Fire Service could act on its own call for legal action rather than pleading for outside intervention after the rubble cools. One year after Shialbari, the question worth asking the Fire Service is simple: how many section 17 complaints has it actually filed?