One of them was 11-year-old Wakia Firdous Nidhi.
She had walked to school that morning like any other day. When the plane hit, her father was at prayer – he ran barefoot from the mosque as soon as he heard.
Her uncle, Syed Billal Hossain, told me that the family spent the entire night searching more than half a dozen hospitals.
“We walked across Uttara, helpless. Someone said six bodies were at one hospital. At one in the morning on Tuesday, her father identified her – by her teeth and a problem in her eye. But we still haven’t been given the body.”
The pain of losing a child was only compounded by the bureaucratic maze.
Despite identifying their daughter by a dental feature and a lens in her eye, the family was told the body wouldn’t be released without DNA tests – because there were multiple claimants.
First, a police report had to be filed. Then the father gave blood at the military hospital. Now they were waiting for the mother’s sample to be drawn. “We know it’s her,” said Mr Hossain. “But they still won’t hand over the body.”
Wakia, the youngest of three siblings, lived next door to her uncle in an old ancestral home in Diabari. “She grew up in front of our eyes – playing on rooftops, sitting under the coconut tree next to our house, always cradling her baby niece. She was just a child, and she loved children,” said Mr Hossain.
“I saw her just the day before,” he said. “If not for that after-school coaching, she’d be alive.”
In the chaos and heartbreak that followed the crash, moments of narrow escape and immense courage stood out.
One mother told BBC Bengali how she’d given her child money for tiffin instead of packing lunch that morning. During the break, he stepped out to buy food – and unknowingly avoided death by mere chance. “He is alive because I didn’t give him tiffin,” she said.
Another parent’s tragedy was unimaginable. He lost both his children within hours. His daughter died first. After burying her, he returned to the hospital only to wake from a brief nap and be told his young son, too, had died.