Bangladesh Teacher Dies Saving Students After Fighter Jet Crash

 In a remarkable act of courage and selflessness, 46-year-old schoolteacher Maherin Chowdhury sacrificed her life to rescue students trapped in a burning classroom after a Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into her school on Monday.

The Chinese-made F-7 BGI aircraft, which had taken off from a nearby air base on a routine training mission, suffered mechanical failure and plummeted into the campus, erupting into a devastating fireball. At least 29 people, most of them children, were killed in the tragedy.

Amid the chaos, Maherin—an English teacher—rushed back into the flames repeatedly to pull her students to safety, despite her own clothes catching fire. “She placed her students’ lives above her own,” her brother Munaf Mojib Chowdhury told Reuters. “When her husband called, begging her to think of her children and leave the building, she replied, ‘They are also my children. They are burning. How can I leave them?’”

Maherin later succumbed to her injuries, having suffered near-total burns. She is survived by her husband and two teenage sons.

The full extent of her bravery is still being recounted. According to her brother, students in the hospital whom she had rescued told him she may have saved at least 20 lives with her own hands. “She ran in while others ran out,” said Khadija Akter, headmistress of the school’s primary section. “She didn’t think twice.”

The military confirmed that the pilot had attempted to steer the aircraft away from populated areas before impact, but he, too, died in the crash.

Maherin Chowdhury was laid to rest on Tuesday in her native district of Nilphamari in northern Bangladesh. Her sacrifice is being hailed across the nation as a testament to the power of duty, compassion, and maternal devotion—even in the face of unimaginable peril.