Investigations

Rana Plaza's Ground Floor Bank Closed the Day Before It Collapsed. The Garment Workers Upstairs Were Told to Report for Their Shift.

A Bangladeshi bank evacuated Rana Plaza the day cracks appeared in its walls. The five garment factories upstairs, sewing for Primark, Walmart, Benetton, and Mango, sent workers back the next morning.

Civilian volunteers assist in rescue efforts after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment building on the outskirts of Dhaka in 2013. Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images

On April 23, 2013, a television crew filmed visible cracks running through the walls of Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building in Savar, Bangladesh. The ground-floor bank and shops closed immediately and did not reopen. The next morning, roughly 3,122 garment workers went back inside the same building anyway, some after managers threatened to withhold a month's wages from anyone who didn't. At 8:57 a.m. on April 24, the building collapsed, killing 1,134 people and injuring about 2,500 more — the deadliest garment-factory disaster on record.

The building's owner had told workers the day before that Rana Plaza was safe. He had personally spent years making sure no inspector was in a position to check.

A Building That Was Never Supposed to Hold What It Held

Rana Plaza was built in 2006 on filled-in pond land, permitted for shops and offices. Its owner, Sohel Rana — a local strongman with ties to the youth wing of the ruling Awami League — added four more floors than his permit allowed, without the structural reinforcement that height would have required. Garment factories, which run heavy vibrating machinery and stack finished fabric in bulk, moved into upper floors engineered for foot traffic and filing cabinets.

Five factories operated inside: New Wave Style, New Wave Bottoms, Phantom Apparel, Phantom Tac, and Ether Tex. Investigators later found generators on an upper floor had been added after the original construction, generators whose vibration is widely cited as a contributing factor in the collapse.

The Day Before

April 23, 2013, morning: Cracks appear in Rana Plaza's structure, visible enough that a local TV crew films them and broadcasts the footage.
April 23, afternoon: The ground-floor bank and retail shops evacuate and close for the day. An engineer who inspected the cracks is reported to have advised the building be shut.
April 23, evening: Sohel Rana tells reporters and workers the building is safe and should reopen the next day.
April 23, evening: Management at Ether Tex tells workers who don't return the next morning they will not be paid for the month, according to survivor accounts collected by labor investigators.
April 24, 8:57 a.m.: Rana Plaza collapses, leaving only the ground floor standing. Roughly 3,122 workers are inside.
May 13, 2013: The 19-day search for survivors and bodies ends with a confirmed death toll of 1,134 and about 2,500 injured.

The Owner, Before and After

Sohel Rana was arrested on April 28, four days after the collapse, while attempting to cross into India at the Benapole border checkpoint. Murder charges were eventually filed against Rana and 40 others in June 2015; separate charges over building code violations named 14 people in June 2014.

The corruption case moved first. In 2017, a Bangladeshi court sentenced Rana to three years in prison for failing to declare his personal wealth to the country's Anti-Corruption Commission — the only conviction to result from Rana Plaza in the years immediately following the collapse. The murder case, carrying a potential death sentence, has not concluded. Of 594 listed witnesses, roughly 94 had testified as of 2025, twelve years after the collapse; two of the 41 original defendants have died awaiting trial, 13 are listed as absconding, and 25 walked free on bail granted by the High Court while the case continued. In January 2024, Bangladesh's Supreme Court ordered the trial court to conclude the case within six months. As of the most recent hearing dates reported in 2025, it had not.

Whose Clothes Were These

Labels recovered from the wreckage and matched to sourcing records tied at least Benetton, Mango, Primark, Walmart, Matalan, El Corte Inglés, and The Children's Place to production inside Rana Plaza's factories, according to reporting compiled in the disaster's aftermath. Several brands, including Benetton and Mango, initially denied any connection; investigators and labor groups attributed the confusion to the layered subcontracting common in garment sourcing, where a brand's order can pass through an intermediary agent to a factory the brand never directly audited or even knew by name.

One Accord, One Alliance

The industry produced two competing responses. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, launched in May 2013, was legally binding: signatory brands committed to fund and enforce independent safety inspections at their supplier factories, with disputes subject to arbitration. More than 200 brands and retailers, mostly European, eventually signed, including H&M, Inditex (Zara's parent), and Primark.

Walmart and roughly a dozen other North American retailers declined to sign the Accord. In July 2013, they instead formed the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a separate initiative covering Gap, Target, Macy's, and others. Labor groups including the Clean Clothes Campaign criticized the Alliance from the outset for lacking the Accord's legally binding enforcement mechanism — inspections without a contractual obligation to pay for the fixes they found necessary.

The Fund That Needed Shaming

The International Labour Organization set up the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund in January 2014 to compensate survivors and victims' families for lost income and medical costs. By November 2014, the fund's coordination committee had calculated it needed $30 million to cover more than 5,000 claims in full. By the collapse's second anniversary in April 2015, the fund was still $2.4 million short, even as the Clean Clothes Campaign ran a public naming campaign listing which of the roughly 28 international brands sourcing from the building had paid and which had not. Primark, which had sourced directly from one of the five factories, became the fund's largest single corporate contributor at $12.4 million. The fund finally reached its $30 million target in June 2015 — two years and two months after the building came down — following a late anonymous donation that closed the remaining gap.

Sohel Rana told workers the building was safe on the evening of April 23, hours after the bank on its ground floor had already decided otherwise and gone home. Twelve years later, the corruption charge against him — for hiding money, not for the building — is the only one that has produced a verdict.

Filed from public reporting:

Rana Plaza's Ground Floor Bank Closed the Day Before It Collapsed. The Garment Workers Upstairs Were Told to Report for Their Shift.

A Building That Was Never Supposed to Hold What It Held

The Day Before

The Owner, Before and After

Whose Clothes Were These

One Accord, One Alliance

The Fund That Needed Shaming

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