Child found alive under rubble in Mexico City

President Peña Nieto declares three days of national mourning

A child has been found alive under the rubble of a collapsed Mexico City school following the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that killed 225 people across Mexico.

The girl was found in the debris at the Enrique Rebsamen school in a southern area of the capital.

Foro TV reported that rescuers spotted the child and shouted to her to move her hand if she could hear them, which she did.

A search dog subsequently entered the wreckage and confirmed she was alive.

At the Rebsamen school, a wing of the three-storey building collapsed.

Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble.

Volunteer Dr Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the pile of rubble.

He made it into a classroom, but found all of its occupants dead.

He said: “We saw some chairs and wooden tables.

“The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults – a woman and a man.”

The federal education department reported late on Tuesday that 25 bodies had been recovered from the school’s wreckage, all but four of them children.

It is not clear whether those deaths were included in the overall death toll of 225 reported by Luis Felipe Puente, chief of Mexico’s national civil defence agency.

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto had earlier reported 22 bodies found and said 30 children and eight adults were reported missing.

Mr Peña Nieto, who declared three days of national mourning, urged people to be calm and said authorities were moving to provide help as 40% of Mexico City and 60% of nearby Morelos state were without power.

But, he said, “the priority at this moment is to keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the injured people”.

Mexico City mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said buildings fell at 44 sites in the capital alone as high-rises across the city swayed and twisted and hundreds of thousands of panicked people ran into the streets.

Mr Mancera said 50 to 60 people were rescued by citizens and emergency workers in the capital.

At the site of a collapsed apartment building in Mexico City, rescuers worked atop a three-story pile of rubble.

Throughout the day, rescuers pulled people, some barely conscious and some seriously injured, from about three dozen collapsed buildings.

Buildings also collapsed in Morelos state, including the town hall and local church in Jojutla near the quake’s epicentre.

The town’s Instituto Morelos secondary school partly collapsed, but school director Adelina Anzures said the earthquake drill held in the morning came in handy.

“I told them that it was not a game, that we should be prepared,” Ms Anzures said of the drill.

When the quake came, she said, children and teachers rapidly filed out and nobody was hurt.

Much of Mexico City is built on former lake bed, and the soil can amplify the effects of earthquakes centred hundreds of miles away.

This quake appeared to be unrelated to the magnitude 8.1 quake that struck on September 7 off Mexico’s southern coast and also was felt in the capital.