“At night the fire spread to other floors where huge amounts of chemicals and other flammable items were stored for use in packaging”, Bhoumik said.
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Senior firefighting official Anis Mahmud said his workers toiled through the night to douse the blaze but the structure was still too risky to enter properly to search through the debris.
Another 12 people are missing after the disaster last Saturday, the worst since the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment complex in 2013 that killed more than 1,100 people.
Mikail Shipar, government secretary with the ministry of labour and employment, said the government was now probing safety at all factories in the Tongi industrial zone.
Low-priced manufacturing is the mainstay in Bangladesh, one of the world’s top garment exporters with a United States dollars 27-billion industry.
On Saturday, 24 bodies were recovered and 50 suffered injuries after the fire broke out at the packaging factory around 6:00am, minutes before the workers were about to change shifts.
Another fire official said that although the blaze was under control, there were still flames inside the building so fire fighters had been unable to search the debris.
The fatal fire which followed a boiler explosion early on Saturday had caused the factory building to collapse.
The sector comprises about 5,000 factories employing more than 4 million workers, 80 per cent of whom are women.
The factory is owned by Syed Mokbul Hossain, a former member of parliament.
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Factory safety is a major concern in Bangladesh, which has thousands of garment and packaging factories that supply products to global chains like Wal-Mart and H&M. It comes just weeks after over 100 people fell ill after inhaling gas that leaked from a fertilizer plant in Chittagong in southern Bangladesh.
