Deadly rains in Bangladesh.

At least 25 people have died and four million people are stranded following flooding caused by monsoon rains, police said on Saturday (June 18th).

Accompanying lightning has killed 21 people since Friday, while four others have died in landslides, according to the same source.

Floods regularly threaten millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh.

But, according to experts, climate change is increasing their frequency, severity and suddenness.

Most of the northeast of the country is under water and troops have been deployed to evacuate residents who find themselves isolated.

Schools have been turned into emergency shelters to accommodate residents of villages that were flooded within hours following heavy flooding.

"The whole village was under water on Friday morning and we all got stuck," said Lokman, whose family lives in the village of Companyganj.

"After waiting all day on the roof of our house, a neighbor rescued us with a makeshift boat. My mother said she had never seen such flooding in her entire life."

Asma Akter, another woman rescued from the rising waters, said her family could not eat for two days.

"The water rose so fast that we couldn't take any of our things," she said.

"The situation is bad"

Accompanying lightning strikes have killed at least 21 people in the South Asian nation since Friday afternoon, police officials said.

Among them, three children aged 12 to 14 were beaten in the town of Nandail on Friday, local police chief Mizanur Rahman said. 

Four other people were killed in landslides in the port city of Chittagong, police inspector Nurul Islam said.

On the flood front, the situation worsened on Saturday morning after a temporary respite from rainfall on Friday afternoon, said Mosharraf Hossain, chief administrator of the Sylhet region government.

"The situation is bad. More than four million people have been stranded by the floods," he said, adding that almost the entire region is without electricity. 

Floods forced Bangladesh's third international airport, located in Sylhet, to close on Friday. 

According to the weather forecast, the floods will worsen over the next two days due to heavy rainfall expected in Bangladesh and northeastern India.

Before this week's rains, the Sylhet region was just recovering from the worst flooding it had seen in almost two decades at the end of May.

They killed at least ten people and affected four million people.

With AFP

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