GUNUNG SITOLI (Indonesia), April 2: Rescuers said on Saturday they had spoken with a battered survivor still alive beneath the rubble five days after a massive earthquake in Indonesia collapsed a two-storey house on top of him. Volunteer doctor Marzuki Saimon said he had talked with a man who became trapped when his two-storey home in the Nias island town of Gunung Sitoli collapsed in Monday’s earthquake. “I have been separated from my children and my wife. I cannot see them,” Mr Saimon quoted the trapped survivor as saying.

“I am shivering from cold and it looks like there are some broken bones and my body is all bruised,” the man was quoted as saying. Saimon, from the Indonesian Red Cross, said he had not been able to see the man he had spoken to but he could hear him clearly. Relatives said four people were trapped under the building and they had been trying to dig them out since the quake using crowbars, sledgehammers and a generator-powered electric chainsaw.

A man helping in the search heard a woman calling for help from under the rubble and saying she was thirsty, said Junianto, a relative. He immediately called Singaporean and Mexican rescue teams for help.

“At 10am today one of my workers heard the voice of a woman who said, ‘I am thirsty, give me a drink’, and after hearing the information I immediately contacted the Singaporean rescue team and also the Mexican rescue workers,” Junianto said.

He identified the trapped people as Hendra Ho Keng, 40, the owner of the collapsed house, his wife Rini, 35, and their two daughters Lia, 11, and Wina, 9. Three other people in the house when it collapsed survived but one was killed, said Junianto, a cousin of Ho Keng. They had all been on the second floor.

Captain Cera Tan of the Singapore Civil Defence team involved in the rescue bid said she also had heard sounds coming from beneath the rubble. She said there was no smell of decomposing flesh, a sign that anyone under the rubble could be alive. “We are working to rescue these people,” she said.

Junianto said he had been told by other rescue teams that there was no chance his relatives had survived. But, he said: “I will never believe that they are dead until their bodies are found.”

Large sections of Gunung Sitoli were reduced to rubble in Monday’s quake, which at 8.7 on the Richter scale was one of the biggest in the past century. UN relief agencies have estimated 1,300 people were killed, most of them in Gunung Sitoli. Fatalities were also reported in the neighbouring island of Simeulue and nearby Singkil district.

The quake struck just three months after a 9.3-strong quake in the same region produced tsunamis that killed around 270,000 people across the Indian Ocean _ the vast majority of them in Indonesia. —AFP