Dhaka, May 6: The death toll from the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh passed 620 on Monday as more bodies were recovered from the site.
The retrieved bodies joined others laid out along the corridors of a nearby school, where family members come to try to find missing relatives.
Well over 200 bodies have been recovered since Wednesday, when authorities said only 149 people had been listed as missing.
The man leading the rescue effort, Brigadier-General Mohammad Siddiqul Alam Sikder, on Monday said he was not expecting the death toll to rise much more.
"We aren't expecting much because the places where we expected most have been already searched," he said.
The April 24 disaster is likely the worst garment-factory accident ever, and there have been few industrial accidents of any kind with a higher death toll.
It surpassed long-ago garment-industry disasters such as New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which killed 146 workers in 1911, and more recent tragedies such as a 2012 fire that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and one in Bangladesh that same year that killed 112.
Bangladesh's 20 billion US dollar garment industry supplies retailers around the world and accounts for about 80 percent of the impoverished country's exports.
