ALEPPO (Syria), Oct 2: At least 31 people were killed when at least a dozen old houses in Syria’s second largest city of Aleppo collapsed on Wednesday, Syrian police officials said.

They said 21 people were injured, four of whom were in critical condition in hospital.

More than a dozen houses collapsed, a civil defence official said, in one of the poorest quarters of the city, where shoddy one or two-storey buildings are cramped close together.

Aleppo Governor Osama Uday was quoted by the state SANA news agency earlier as saying old caverns beneath the homes had caved in before dawn, leading to the collapse of the homes in Aleppo in northwest Syria.

“We were asleep when we heard a loud crash at about four o’clock and the power cut out,” said Adnan Deiri, who lives across the road from the collapsed houses.

“We ran out to the balcony but all we could see was fire and dust and smoke. It wasn’t until the dust cleared 15 minutes later that we saw the whole block had collapsed,” said Deiri, adding that he had evacuated his family from the house.

Rescue workers are digging through the rubble, some with their bare hands, struggling to lift heavy slabs of concrete to rescue people who could be trapped inside the ruins.

Reuters correspondents saw rescue workers pull out the bloodied bodies of three small children from the rubble as others used drills to dig deeper.

“I ran to my brother’s house when I heard the noise,” said Maher Qolli, 32, who lost several members of his family in the collapse.—Reuters