Bangladesh survivor Reshma Begum: I never dreamed I'd see daylight again

First came the collapse. At 9am, as the day's work started, a ripping, tearing sound, clouds of choking dust, the screams of colleagues and finally silence. Then came fire, rain, and 16 long days in the darkness under the rubble, surrounded by the decaying corpses of her friends and colleagues. On Friday came hope.

Through the morning, Reshma Begum, a seamstress who worked on the second floor of the Rana Plaza in a suburb of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, heard rescuers close by. But none heard her.

"I heard voices of the rescue workers. I kept hitting the wreckage with sticks and rods to attract their attention," she told reporters from a hospital bed.

At about 3pm, Abdur Razzaq, an army sergeant deployed to help search the 7,000 tonnes of rubble that was all that remained of the Rana Plaza, picked up the faint sound of metallic tapping. "I heard the sound and rushed towards the spot. I knelt down and heard a faint voice. 'Sir, please help me,' she cried," Razzaq told the Guardian.

The woman had been breathing through a pipe from inside the wreckage, Razzaq said, and had sustained no serious injury.