Cox's Bazar  - Six members of a single family were among the ten lives claimed by the fire that tore through the wooden-framed Tuptup Restro and Resort in Cox's Bazar.

They had journeyed to this tourist haven to breathe the salt-laden air rising from the sea, to escape the maddening cacophony of Dhaka. But who could have known that they would breathe their last in an inferno?

It all unfolded before they could fathom the ferocity of the blaze that would utterly gut the two-storey structure resort building which, according to a fire service official, had never received permission from any government agency to be constructed at all.

Friends and netizens flooded social media with tributes mourning the tourists, so cruelly young in age.

Two of them were undergraduates of two leading universities; the University of Dhaka and Jagannath University. Nafis Tehami was a student of Dhaka University; Layla Zahan Nabila, of Jagannath University. Top officials of their respective institutions condoled the tragedy and urged the authorities to investigate the incident and bring to justice all those responsible for this culpable homicide.

Layla Zahan Nabila's three sisters; Faria Kabir (33), Israt Jahan Maliha (30), and Milita Mehezabin Alvi—were lost in the blaze. Her brother Nasir Uddin (25) and her five-year-old nephew Faizan Noor, Faria's son, were among the victims.

"Six lives! Six smiling faces! Six promising futures! Yet a terrible fire in moments devastated how many dreams, how much joy, how much love — the world of a family built over a lifetime," wrote Mozammel Hoque Chanchal, a journalist in Dhaka, in a Facebook post.

Chanchal said the family belonged to one of his closest school friends.

The children around whom the parents had woven a thousand dreams, the relatives' hearts brimming with affection, all the plans for the days to come — today the sky and the air have grown heavy with weeping for them, he wrote.

In the home where, perhaps just a short while ago, laughter bustled, silence and a mountain of grief have now descended.

"Just thinking about it makes the heart cry out in anguish!"

Ashikul Islam, a resident of Dhaka's Bansree who survived the blaze, said that nine members of his family—including his wife and sister-in-law—had checked into the resort last Thursday. Around 7 am on Saturday, a loud sound erupted from the resort's kitchen, and within moments the fire had spread through the entire resort.

As the flames grew fiercer, Ashikul and two others managed to escape, but he could not find the remaining six.

Firefighters pulled the charred bodies from the wreckage only after they had subdued the flames. Six others who suffered burns were rushed to a nearby hospital. By afternoon, the authorities announced that the death toll had risen to ten.

According to the local administration, 30 people were staying at the resort at the time of the fire, which gutted the beachfront structure, its roof adorned with sun-grass—leaving only charred remains.

After the tragedy, Brigadier General Sultanul Afreen Junaid, head of the Fire Service and Civil Defence Department, said it had been learned that Tuptup Resort possessed neither a fire safety licence nor the necessary documents. They had been warned last June, but the warning went unheeded.

It is a matter of grave concern that many other resorts, which are selling rooms in the style of eco-tourism in the country's largest tourist destination, frequented by more than three million travellers annually; likewise lack fire safety.

Many are being built on the banks of the Bay of Bengal to tap the tourism potential of the world's longest unbroken sandy beach, which Cox's Bazar hosts. Bangladesh's tourism sector cannot afford such accidents, and this one is presumed to have been caused by negligence.