Nine-year-old Fatima Akhter Anisa, who once dreamed of soaring to the Burj Khalifa, has lost her life in a devastating school fire following the crash of an air force jet, shattering the hearts of those who called her their little bird.
Anisa had planned to visit the Burj Khalifa in Dubai with her father this year. A third-grader at Milestone School and College in Dhaka’s Uttara area, Anisa loved to travel and draw.
During video calls with her expatriate father, Gani Sheikh, she would often ask: “Where are we going to visit this year?”
Her father had promised to take her to the Burj Khalifa very soon.
Every time Anisa's mother called her father, he would eagerly ask to speak with his “little bird.” At home, her uncles fondly called her “Ansu the bird.”
But on Monday, when a phone call reached Anisa’s father, it brought news that shattered him — Anisa would never speak to him on video call again.
A fire had broken out at her school. Anisa’s entire body had been burned in the incident.
Like any other day... until it was not
Anisa got ready in the morning to go to school with her mother. Her younger brother Osman, who studies in the nursery section at the same school, was unwell that day. So, Anisa went with her cousin instead.
Her cousin dropped her off on the way to work. Her mother had packed food in Anisa’s school bag, just as she did every day, because Anisa would attend coaching after school and then return home with her mother.
Around 1pm, Anisa’s maternal uncles, Swapan Mir and Leon Mir, saw news on Facebook that there had been a fire at Milestone. Images showed children running around with burn injuries.
They rushed to the school immediately. When they could not find Anisa, family members and friends began searching for her in various hospitals in Uttara.
Swapan said: “We searched like mad. We saw injured children being taken to hospitals one after another — some with severe burns, some with partial burns — all of them crying out in pain. We still held on to hope that we would find our loved one, even in that condition.”
He continued: “None of us could have imagined seeing our bird-like baby Fatima like that. When we reached the Combined Military Hospital (CMH), we found Anisa — all the skin was gone from her body. One foot was bare; the shoe on the other had melted and stuck to her skin. Her clothes were fused with her body and bag, as if everything had melted together. But her school ID card was still hanging around her neck. It clearly read: ‘Fatema Akhter, Bangla version, grade three.’”
Swapan broke down in tears as he spoke. During the interview, he sat beside Anisa’s grave. Just a few hours earlier, at 10:30am on Tuesday, she had been buried at the family’s village home in Bagerhat.
He then fell silent for about 40 seconds, unable to speak. This reporter did not press him further. After a while, Swapan said softly: “Our Anisa fairy is now in the sky.”
On Monday afternoon, another uncle, Leon Mir — a journalist at Boishakhi TV — was frantically searching for Anisa. He asked people to help identify which hospital she might have been taken to.
He even went live on social media, pleading with fellow journalists and viewers: “If anyone has seen an injured girl named Fatima, with long hair down to her legs, please let us know.”
After three hours of desperate searching, they found Anisa in the morgue.
There was no difficulty identifying her — the little girl’s face was untouched. But the rest of her body had been completely burned.
Leon broke down next to her body, screaming and crying. “We have no complaints against anyone. Just give us the body,” he pleaded. “We do not want to wait any longer. Let us touch our little angel. We just want to hold her in our arms once.”
“We do not want a DNA test,” he added. “We can identify our child.”
Nonetheless, a DNA test was conducted, and Anisa’s body was officially handed over to the family later that night.
Her father, Gani, returned from Qatar on Tuesday morning. The family then left immediately for their village home with her remains.
When Leon spoke to this reporter on Tuesday, he was still crying. “We do not have the strength. How will my sister bury her child here and then return to Dhaka?”
Anisa's mother had wanted to bury her daughter in Dhaka. She could not bear the thought of leaving her child so far away.
Whenever Anisa visited her village from Dhaka, the neighbours would gather just to see her long, beautiful hair. “Everyone said she looked like an angel,” recalled Swapan.
He added: “Anisa never fussed about food like other children. She was very bright, very good in her studies. She could recite English rhymes fluently. She used to study in the English version, and she was very good in English, so we had shifted her to the Bengali version this year.”
He recalled that Anisa loved playing with her bicycle and enjoyed seeing the sea. “Last year, we took her to the beach. She has two younger brothers. She loved them dearly.”
“How will we cope with this grief?” he asked.
Leon added: “I have been raising our Ansu with my own hands since she was six months old. I used to feed her myself. I raised her. How can we possibly accept this loss?”
According to family members, Fatima Akhter Anisa was rescued by an army helicopter and taken immediately to the Combined Military Hospital. There, the attending doctor declared her dead.
