ITALY: Tiny bodies shrouded in blankets line the school gym, which has been turned into a makeshift morgue and prayer chapel since the earthquake shook a mountainside village in southern Italy on Thursday morning.
San Giuliano di Puglia was in mourning yesterday as the death toll reached 29, including 26 children who were crushed to death in the village school as they were celebrating Hallowe'en.
Police officers in blood-stained uniforms were on guard outside the gym, allowing only small, silent groups of relatives to enter the building, where the stretchers are covered with blankets once used during the children's school naps.
About 20 coffins lie on the basketball court, the lids resting against the gym's green and white walls.
"I came face to face with death," said Giuseppe di Tullio, who was at home with one of his daughters when the quake hit. His other daughter was at school. "But we are all safe and sound," he said, his face covered with dust from the rubble.
Rescue workers arrived an hour and a half later. Parents dug, sawed and cut through the rubble in search of survivors, many using their bare hands.
A few metres away doctors had set up a makeshift infirmary, where they tended to rescued survivors waiting to be evacuated.
Older women dressed in black, their faces covered with headscarves, prayed alongside a young mother overcome with grief.
The shock and fatigue were showing on the faces of dazed firefighters and emergency workers still on the scene after 24 sleepless hours spent searching for life amid the tangle of fallen masonry and children's bodies.
As the grim reality of the village's loss sank in, so, too, did the magnitude of the task still facing relief workers.
When a second terrifying tremor shook the village yesterday afternoon, registering 5.1 on the Richter scale, the authorities ordered the village's 1,500 inhabitants, many of them elderly and infirm, to stay outside.
San Giuliano di Puglia was a ghost village last night after residents were evacuated from their homes to a makeshift camp at a nearby sports ground, where they were to spend the night under canvas.
The Red Cross has shipped in tents, field kitchens, chemical toilets and medicines for the traumatised villagers, while forestry wardens stand guard over their empty homes.