BANGKOK (Kashmir English): Rescuers found a woman alive from the ruins of a hotel in Myanmar three days after a massive earthquake hit the South-Asian nation.
The massive earthquake killed around 2,000 as searchers in Myanmar and Thailand raced against time to find more survivors.
The woman was pulled from the rubble alive after 60 hours being trapped under the collapsed Great Wall Hotel in the city of Mandalay.
The rescue could be made possible only after a 5-hour operation by Chinese, Russian and local teams, according to a post by Chinese embassy on Facebook. It said she was in stable condition early on Monday.
Mass destruction in Myanmar
Mandalay is close to the epicentre of the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that occurred on Friday and wreaked mass destruction in Myanmar and caused damage in neighbouring Thailand.
Although the hopes are dim for more survivors but Thai rescue officials are still focusing on collapsed Bangkok skyscraper where 76 are feared trapped.
In Thailand’s capital Bangkok, emergency crews used cranes and dog sniffers on Monday to continue a desperate search for 76 people believed to be buried under the rubble of an under-construction skyscraper collapsed in the earthquake.
Chadchart Sittipunt, Bangkok Governor, said rescuers are not giving up despite the conventional-wisdom window for finding people alive fast approaching.
“The search will continue even after 72 hours because in Turkey, people who have been trapped for a week have survived. The search has not been cancelled,” Chadchart said.
He said machine scans of the rubble have sparked hopes that there may still be people alive underneath adding sniffer dogs are being dispatched to try to pinpoint their locations.
“We’ve detected weak life signs and there are many spots,” he said.
Thailand’s official death toll was at 18 on Sunday, but could shoot up without more rescues at the collapsed building site.
In Myanmar, according to state media, at least 1,700 people have been confirmed dead.
Three Myanmar neighbours India, China and Thailand have sent relief materials and teams, along with aid and personnel from Malaysia, Singapore and Russia to the earthquake-hit country.
The earthquake devastation has piled more misery on the country, already in chaos from a civil war caused by a countrywide uprising after a 2021 military coup ousted the elected government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
