The death toll from an earthquake in southern Italy rose overnight to 22, including 20 children buried under the rubble of a school building, police said early on Friday.
Rescue workers in the village of San Giuliano di Puglia, worst hit by the quake, toiled frantically throughout the night in the hope of rescuing three or four survivors believed to have been buried alive when the quake struck Thursday morning during preparations for a school Halloween party. One teacher was believed to be among the trapped survivors, a local resident told AFP.
Fresh rescue crews, with sniffer dogs, arrived on the scene overnight to relieve exhausted colleagues. They had managed to pull out two schildren alive in the small hours of the morning, including one called Angelo whom the rescue workers had been trying to reach for hours after he was discovered with his feet pinned under a paving slab, police said. Most of the victims were primary school children aged seven or eight.
The quake, measuring 5,4 on the Richter scale, also claimed the lives of two women, aged 56 and 90, whose homes in the same town were also hit.
The school gym was turned into a makeshift mortuary and chapel of prayer where the bodies of the 18 children and two women were laid out. The school complex collapsed when the quake rocked the Campobasso region in the morning, causing buildings to topple in San Guiliano, an historic hilltop village of 1 200 residents. All the victims in the school were in the old part of the building, built in 1953. Those in a section opened last September survived.
Forty people, including seven or eight children, were hospitalised in neighbouring Larino, where their condition was listed as not serious, hospital official Vincenzi D’Angelo said earlier. – Sapa-AFP