Myanmar quake victim rescued after 5 days
NAYPYIDAW
Rescuers on Wednesday pulled a man alive from the rubble five days after Myanmar's devastating earthquake, as calls grew for the junta to allow more aid in and halt attacks on rebels.
The shallow 7.7-magnitude earthquake on Friday flattened buildings across Myanmar, killing more than 2,700 people and making thousands more homeless.
Several leading armed groups fighting the military have suspended hostilities during the quake recovery, but junta chief Min Aung Hlaing vowed to continue "defensive activities" against "terrorists."
U.N. agencies, rights groups and foreign governments have urged all sides in Myanmar's civil war to stop fighting and focus on helping those affected by the quake, the biggest to hit the country in decades.
Hopes of finding more survivors are fading, but there was a moment of joy on Wednesday as a man was pulled alive from the ruins of a hotel in the capital Naypyidaw.
The 26-year-old hotel worker was extracted by a joint Myanmar-Turkish team shortly after midnight, the fire service and junta said.
Dazed and dusty but conscious, the man was pulled through a hole in the rubble and put on a stretcher, video posted on Facebook by the Myanmar Fire Services Department shows.
Min Aung Hlaing said Tuesday that the death toll had risen to 2,719, with more than 4,500 injured and 441 still missing.
But with patchy communication and infrastructure delaying efforts to gather information and deliver aid, the true scale of the disaster has yet to become clear, and the toll is likely to rise.
Relief groups say that that response has been hindered by continued fighting between the junta and the complex patchwork of armed groups opposed to its rule, which began in a 2021 coup.
Julie Bishop, the U.N. special envoy on Myanmar, called on all sides to "focus their efforts on the protection of civilians, including aid workers, and the delivery of life-saving assistance.”
Even before March 28's earthquake, 3.5 million people were displaced by the fighting, many of them at risk of hunger, according to the United Nations.
Late Tuesday, an alliance of three of Myanmar's most powerful ethnic minority armed groups announced a one-month pause in hostilities to support humanitarian efforts in response to the quake.
The announcement by the Three Brotherhood Alliance followed a separate partial ceasefire called by the People's Defense Force, civilian groups that took up arms after the coup to fight junta rule.
But there have been multiple reports of junta air strikes against rebel groups since the quake.
Australia's government decried the reported air strikes saying they "exacerbated the suffering of the people."
Hundreds of kilometers away, in the Thai capital Bangkok, workers continued to scour a pile of rubble that formed when March 28's tremors collapsed a 30-story skyscraper.
The structure had been under construction at the time, and its crash buried dozens of builders, few of whom have come out alive.
The death toll at the site has risen to 22, with more than 70 still believed trapped in the rubble.
