Baby boy rescued from the rubble of Russian block after gas blast

Russian rescuers yesterday retrieved a baby boy from the ruins of an apartment block that collapsed in a gas explosion more than a day earlier, killing at least seven people and leaving dozens missing.

“The rescuers heard crying. The baby was saved by being in a cradle and warmly wrapped up,” Chelyabinsk regional governor Boris Dubrovsky said on his Telegram channel.

Mr Dubrovsky posted video of rescuers pulling the 10-monthold child from a gap between concrete panels and running with him wrapped in a blanket to an ambulance.

The mother of the boy also survived the blast, emergency services said.

The child is in an extremely grave condition with serious frostbite of his limbs, a head injury and leg fractures, and he will be moved to Moscow for treatment.

Part of the 10-storey building collapsed after a gas explosion on Monday morning in the industrial city of Magnitogorsk, nearly 1,700 kilometres east of Moscow in the Ural mountains.

The baby was found after rescuers were forced to temporarily halt the search for dozens of missing people in the rubble for fear the rest of the block could come down. He survived temperatures that fell overnight to minus 27°C.

So far the incident has claimed at least seven lives and only six survivors have been found, including a 13-year-old boy.

The Soviet-era apartment block was home to about 1,100 people. The blast destroyed 35 flats, while 10 more were damaged.

Residents left homeless were moved to a nearby school.

Battling the freezing temperatures, rescuers worked through the night combing through debris and trying to stabilise the remaining walls.

But yesterday morning the head of Russia’s emergencies ministry, Yevgeny Zinichev, said the operation had to be halted temporarily.

Mr Zinichev warned there was a real threat at least part of the building would fall.

“It’s impossible to continue working in such conditions,” he said.

After an all-night search, officials said yesterday morning that they had found seven bodies, all of them adults, while another 37 people remained unaccounted for.