They live in different parts of the city. They do not know each other. But humanity and conscience brought them to the edge of an abandoned well on Friday night.
Using a catcher-like device the three strangers built together, they brought up from a depth of 258 feet the body of four-year-old Jihad who had been trapped and later died in an abandoned well in the capital’s Shahjahanpur Railway Colony.
Some 23 hours after the boy had fallen into the nearly 500-foot deep well, car businessman Shafiqul Islam Faruk, private sector employee Shah Md Abdullah Al Moon and engineering student Shujan Das Rahul, were able to do what the fire service had failed to do.
Jihad had fallen into the well at 3:30pm on Friday. After attempting to rescue the boy for nearly a whole day, the fire service called of its rescue operation around 2:40pm on Saturday and announced that they had not detected any trace of human life in the well shaft.
But the three men, part of a massive community volunteer effort, did not give up.
The trio, who had spent the morning working out the details of their rescue device in cooperation with fire fighters, were using the third iteration of the device which had first been tried out around 9:30 in the morning.
Minutes after the announcement that the rescue had been called off, the volunteers scooped Jihad’s body out of the chilly slush at 3pm on Saturday.
It was too late.
Throughout the operation, several groups of volunteers worked alongside the fire service to figure out a way to extricate the stricken child from the narrow shaft.
The three volunteers had started to construct their catcher-like device around 8am on Saturday morning.
Shafiqul Islam Faruk, who had attended a short course on motor vehicles in Germany in 1990, went to the site of the rescue operation around midnight on Friday after seeing the news on the television.
He had built a catcher from scratch at home in Bashundhara residential area and rushed to the site.
“Hundreds of people had gathered. I wanted to show my idea to the firemen but failed, despite several attempts, to get in touch with any of them. Then, I joined rescue effort myself,” he said.
Shah Md Abdullah Al Moon, an electrical engineering student of Rangpur polytechnic who lives in Rampura, got to the rescue site around the same time after watching the news.
“When I heard they were repeatedly failing to rescue the boy, something began to work inside me. I felt I had to go there, to see if I could do something. I rushed over to see how I could help the rescue effort,” Al Moon said.
Shujan Das Rahul, a mechanical engineering student of the Institute of Engineers Bangladesh, went to the Shahjahanpur Railway Colony with two room mates from his Monipuripara mess. His room mates later left because of the cold weather. But Rahul stayed on.
“When I heard the fire service say their camera showed there was nothing inside the well shaft, I did not believe it. In my heart, I was sure the boy was there,” he told the Dhaka Tribune.
The three volunteers had been helping fire service rescuers since midnight.
“We were talking with each other from time to time and helping the rescuers. We were discussing how best to build a catcher,” said Moon.
“We did not have any preconceived ideas. We were just sorting through the problems that rescuers were having with the catcher they were using,” said Rahul.
At one point we agreed with each other to build one ourselves.
“Using iron rods and a camera borrowed from another man, Anwar, we started to construct a catcher,” Faruk said.
“Everyone around us was convinced that the floating waste inside the shaft was the lowest layer of the well. But we decided to make a catcher which could go deeper than the slush. We had a strong belief that the boy was trapped under the waste,” Rahul said.
“Everyone is now talking about us. But I am not happy. We failed to rescue the boy,” said Rahul, the two others nodding in agreement.
“When I held the boy in my arms, I knew he was dead. I was overwhelmed with sorrow,” Moon said.