Rescue workers were today continuing the painstaking search for over 220 people, including an Irish man, trapped in buildings destroyed in the New Zealand earthquake.
JJ O’Connor, who is married with children, is an accountant who worked at the Pyne Gould Guinness (PGG) Building in Christchurch which was flattened in Tuesday's disaster.
The 40-year-old comes from Abbeydorney in Co Kerry, where it is understood his mother and siblings still live.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said Irish diplomats on the ground have spoken to family and emergency workers and are certain he was in the building when the powerful 6.3 quake hit on Tuesday.
Police have said the death toll in the New Zealand earthquake has risen to 113, with 228 missing. No survivors have been found since Wednesday afternoon. Over 2,500 were injured in the quake, more than 160 of them seriously.
Meanwhile, the family of a Monaghan man crushed to death in his car are preparing to fly his body home. Psychiatric nurse Eoin McKenna, who had been living in the country for about six years, is among those confirmed dead.
The DFA initially had reports of concerns over 300 Irish citizens in New Zealand after the quake struck. That has been whittled down to 17 people, but the majority were people who have lost contact with distant friends and family and foreign affairs chiefs have no serious concerns for any of these.
Meanwhile, international rescue teams searched through the rubble of quake-ravaged city today for the missing, but rain and cold were dimming hopes of finding more survivors in the country's worst natural disaster in decades.
Teams from quake-prone countries such as Japan, Taiwan and the United States used sniffer dogs and microphones to scour collapsed buildings for any sign of life. A 63-strong team of British emergency fire and rescue service workers have landed in the country and set up camp in Christchurch, where they will help look for survivors.
Many of the missing were students who had come to the city, one of New Zealand's most attractive, from Japan, China, Taiwan and India to learn English against a backdrop of the country's dramatic southern alps.
"For those people in those far off places, your families are our families, your children are our children," Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker said in a message to their families overseas, promising searchers would not abandon hope.
Tales were emerging of daring rescues, with doctors in the depths of one collapsed building having to use a penknife to amputate one man's legs to free him. "There wasn't really any other option. Essentially the procedure was performed with a Swiss Army knife. I know that sounds terrible, but that's all we had," Dr Stuart Philip told the Dominion Post newspaper.
Rescuers pulled aside massive stone blocks and 13 one-tonne church bells from the toppled spire of the landmark ChristChurch Cathedral in the city heart, where as many as 22 bodies could now be trapped in a square popular with tourists.
"We're having to move extremely slowly, we're working brick by brick. There are a lot of loved ones in here that we want to get out," rescue worker Steve Culhane said.
Fears that a teetering 26-storey hotel might be toppled by aftershocks eased after engineers found the building had stabilised over the past day, allowing an exclusion zone around it to be narrowed and for rescuers to enter nearby buildings.
Agencies