Child saved nearly 60 hours after Philippine landslide
The rescue of a child on Friday nearly 60 hours after a landslide hit a gold-mining village in the southern Philippines has been hailed as a "miracle" after searchers had given up hope of finding more survivors. The girl, who the Philippine Red Cross said was three years old, had been among scores of people missing after the rain-induced landslide hit the village. Officials said later on Friday the death toll had almost doubled to 27. The girl was earlier found as rescuers used their bare hands and shovels to look for survivors in Masara village on southern Mindanao island, said disaster agency official Edward Macapili of Davao de Oro province. "It's a miracle," Macapili said, adding that searchers had believed those missing were probably dead. "That gives hope to the rescuers. A child's resilience is usually less than that of adults, yet the child survived." Video of a rescuer carrying the crying, mud-caked child in his arms was shared on Facebook. "We can see in the social media posts that the child did not have any visible injuries," Macapili said. He said the girl's father saw his child before she was taken to a medical facility for a check-up. The Philippine Red Cross posted photos on Facebook of their workers carrying the girl, wrapped in an emergency blanket and hooked up to an oxygen tank, into a hospital in nearby Mawab municipality. The landslide struck on Tuesday night, destroying houses and engulfing three buses and a jeepney waiting to pick up workers from a gold mine. While the death toll increased to 27 from 15, the number of missing fell to 89 from more than 100, official figures showed, as searchers retrieved more bodies. The number of injured also rose to 32. (AFP)