Photo : Woman Found Alive After 17 Days Under Collapse Building In Bangladesh

For many days, rescue workers plowing through the site of last month April’s building collapse in Bangladesh had the grim task of pulling out body after body of dead people, some already decomposing.

But on Friday, as the operation wound down, they miraculously found a survivor. Crews digging through the rubble heard a woman’s soft voice pleading for help: I’m alive. Please rescue me...

According to Capt. Ibrahim Islam, a Bangladeshi military official outside the site of the recovery operation, they extracted the woman in an operation that last about one hour.

Crowds converged to pray for the woman as rescuers rushed her to a hospital. Her name is Reshma. And she’s the last person to come out alive, several days after they started removing dead bodies.

The rescue of Reshma comes more than two weeks after a nine-storey-building in a Bangladesh complex housing factories full of garment workers caved in, becoming South Asia’s deadliest industrial disaster.