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Hopes fade of more quake survivors
ALGIERS, Algeria -- The rescue of two 2-year-old girls were rare bright spots in a day of dashed hopes after the Algerian earthquake that killed more than 1,600 people. Hopes of finding more survivors amid the rubble were fading despite frantic efforts by rescue workers from around the world and their sniffer dogs. Emilie Kaidi, 2, emerged in the hands of a Spanish volunteer rescue worker from Firemen Without Borders from the rubble of her home in Corso, east of Algiers, Friday two days after the country's worst earthquake in 25 years. Emilie survived in her collapsed ground floor bedroom, protected from the rubble by a door that fell on a television set, giving her shelter for almost two days, The Associated Press reported. Her father was lightly injured in the quake, her mother escaped injury, but the fate of her 4-year-old sister Lisa was unclear. Emlie's constant cries for her mother led rescue workers to her. Meanwhile French rescuers pulled 2-and-a-half-year-old Yousra Hamenniche out of a hole cut in the roof of her apartment block, which had contracted like a giant concertina when the tremor came, Reuters said. Her release after more than 36 hours was bittersweet for her father: six members of his family were still missing. Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia told a news conference the dead now numbered more than 1,600. He said about 4,200 people had been pulled alive from the rubble of flattened buildings, but warned: "The victim figures are expected to rise." State news agency APS said 7,207 people had been counted as being injured in the quake, which measured 6.7 in magnitude. Officials said the area worst-hit was Boumerdes, to the east of Algiers. That town alone accounted for some 835 of the dead and still had more than 1,200 missing. The Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned the death toll could reach 2,000 as rescue teams discovered more victims in outlying villages along the North African state's heavily populated Mediterranean coast. "We do not want to get into the body count game but you are probably going to end up with 2,000," the federation's operations manager, Iain Logan, told Reuters. The Red Cross and Red Crescent federation appealed for 2 million Swiss francs ($1.55 million) to help the local Red Crescent provide food and shelter to more than 10,000 victims. Britain, Russia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Turkey all responded with search and rescue teams and supplies.
The imam of the main mosque in the capital, Algiers, told worshipers at Friday prayers that the calamity was -- like the flooding and quakes that have plagued the country for years -- a message from God to those who had chosen to forget him. "People think the earthquake is a natural phenomenon, they think they can explain it through science," Mohamed Slimane said in a sermon aired on national television. "They forget who is behind it, it is God." Off the Spanish coast, about 100 fishing boats were sunk by waves sent across the Mediterranean from the quake's epicenter. Earthquake rescue veterans from several European countries fanned out in teams across the town, using sniffer dogs and listening devices to find survivors. "Search, search!" one rescuer urged his dogs as they disappeared into a mass of broken and crushed concrete that was once a four-story building. But with the temperature up to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, no one pretended the chances of survival were good. The teams moved swiftly from building to building, leaving local residents and civil protection workers to delve for the dead, sometimes with only sledgehammers and bare hands. Residents told Reuters that men and women were in many cases caught in separate rooms when the tremor came -- men were settling down to watch the Porto-Celtic UEFA Cup soccer clash and women preparing evening meals. Some grumbled help came too late and some, noting that older buildings had withstood the shock, accused builders of erecting unsafe structures in a quake-prone region. Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
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