A 56-year-old man dug out alive from the rubble of the earthquake-hit Iranian city of Bam after 13 days has died, a medic said yesterday.
Medics had a dim view of Jalil's chances when he was clawed out from under shattered mud-bricks by rescue workers who found his emaciated body shielded by a wardrobe on Wednesday afternoon.
He was able to whisper his first name and age to his rescuers, before slipping into a coma.
"He died at 2 a.m. this morning . . . he died while still in a coma," Mr Mehdi Shadnoush, part of a Ukrainian-Iranian medical team, said from Bam.
Only a handful of survivors have been pulled from the dense rubble to which Bam's mostly mud brick houses have been reduced. Before Jalil the last was a 97-year-old woman rescued on on Sunday last.
The ancient citadel city of Bam was by flattened by an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale before dawn on December 26th. More than 30,000 people were killed. - (Reuters)