Newborn baby rescued from rubble of Venezuela quake

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela – A newborn baby has been rescued from a fallen building 32 hours after the twin earthquakes that devastated a Venezuelan coastal city.

Video shared on social media on June 26 shows rescuers working under a floodlight atop collapsed masonry and bringing the infant out to applause late on June 26 in the hardest-hit city of La Guaira, north of the capital Caracas.

They carefully pass the baby, wrapped in a quilt, from person to person before cleaning the child gently with tissues, the video shows.

According to the user, Andreina Quintero, who published the video on social media, the baby was just 18 days old and was uninjured after being trapped for 32 hours. The child’s mother was rescued an hour after the child.

In a follow-up video later on June 26, Quintero showed the mother in a hospital bed, with a medical worker telling her that the baby did not appear to have injuries.

The medic then suggests that the mother saved the baby by covering the child with her body or another object.

At least 920 people were killed by back-to-back earthquakes on June 24 of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 and thousands more were injured or remain missing. AFP