Three Days' Mourning For Quake Victims
Updated:07:33, Monday May 19, 2008
China has begun three days of national mourning for the tens of thousands of people killed in a massive earthquake one week ago.
The country's 1.3 billion-strong population observed three minutes of silence exactly seven days after the quake left
an estimated 71,000 people dead or missing.
The horns of cars, trains and ships and air raid sirens sounded to mark the moment.
The Olympic torch relay was also suspended for the mourning period.
The national flag in Tiananmen Square, which is raised in a solemn ceremony every morning at dawn, fluttered at half-mast.
The mastheads of all newspapers were printed in black.
The mourning period begins as hope of finding more trapped survivors dwindled, and preventing hunger and disease among the homeless became more pressing.
More than 200 rescue workers have been buried by a mud flow, reports say.
"It will soon be too late" to find trapped survivors, said Koji Fujiya, deputy leader of a Japanese rescue team working in Beichuan, a town reduced to rubble.
His team pulled 10 bodies out of Beichuan's high school on Sunday in the northern part of Sichuan province.
Dozens of aftershocks have rumbled through the region, extending the damage and stretching the already jangled nerves of survivors.
With more corpses discovered, the confirmed death toll rose to 32,476, the State Council, China's cabinet, reported.
The injured numbered more than 220,000.
Many bodies lay by roadsides in body bags or wrapped in plastic sheeting, as authorities struggled to dig burial pits and crematoriums worked overtime.
The World Health Organszation warned that shortages of clean water and warmer, humid weather in Sichuan province - which bore the brunt of the earthquake - were ripe for epidemics.
Source:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1316412,00.html
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200 rescuers buried :no:
