Man, 72, pulled alive from rubble almost 2 weeks after Ecuador earthquake
The strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattened buildings and buckled highways along its Pacific coast.
A 72-year-old man was pulled from rubble in western Ecuador after being trapped for almost two weeks since the earthquake that killed nearly 650 people in the country, officials said Saturday.
The man was located Friday after a search team from Venezuela heard him "making sounds in a partially collapsed house" in the coastal province of Manabi, the team was quoted as saying in a statement posted by the Venezuelan embassy in Quito.
The man, named as Manuel Vasquez, was suffering from kidney failure and dehydration and had lost three toes, it said. He was taken to a hospital in the town of Jaramijo.
The earthquake that struck on April 16 left 660 people dead, according to the latest government figures, with 32 still missing and more than 4,600 injured.
More than 22,000 people remain in emergency shelters two weeks after the 7.8-magnitude tremblor, officials said.
A total of 29 foreigners have been identified among the dead, including 10 Colombians, two Britons, an Irishman, an Italian, a Frenchman and a German, the prosecutor's office said a week earlier.
President Rafael Correa said he would raise the value-added tax by two percentage points for a year and charge wealthy Ecuadorans a capital levy in order to pay for an estimated $3 billion in damage.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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