Reuters, Tirana :
At least seven people were killed when the most powerful earthquake to hit Albania in decades rocked the capital Tirana and surrounding region early on Tuesday, causing buildings to collapse and burying residents under rubble.
Residents, some carrying babies, fled apartment buildings in the capital Tirana after the 6.4 magnitude quake struck shortly before 4 a.m. (0300 GMT).
In the nearby northen town of Thumane, Marjana Gjoka, 48, was sleeping in her apartment on the fourth floor of a five-storey building when the quake shattered the two top floors. “The roof collapsed on our head and I don’t know how we escaped. God helped us,” said Gjoka, whose three-year-old niece was among four people in the apartment when the quake struck.
The quake was centred 30 km (19 miles) west of Tirana, at a shallow depth of 10 km (6 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, and was also felt across the Balkans and in the southern Italian region of Puglia.
Two women were found dead in the rubble of an apartment building in the northern town of Thumane, and a man died in the town of Kurbin after panicking and jumping out of a building, a Defence Ministry spokeswoman said. The bodies of three other people were pulled from the wreckage of two collapsed buildings in Durres, the defence ministry said, and a man died near the northern town of Lezhe.
Firefighters, police and civilians were removing the debris from collapsed buildings that had trapped people in Thumane. Most of the buildings that collapsed were built of bricks, a Reuters reporter said.
Rescuers in Thumane used a mechanical digger to claw at collapsed masonry and remove a tangle of metal and cables. Others groped with bare hands to clear rubble.
Two people were pulled out from rubble in Thumane four hours after the quake, a Reuters reporter on the site said. Doctors said they were in bad condition. “Everything at home kept falling down,” Refik, a Tirana resident, said of the impact on his sixth-floor apartment.
“We were awake because of the previous quakes, but the last one shook us around,” he told Reuters, referring to several smaller tremors recorded in the hour before the main quake.
Emergency workers told local media one of those killed was an elderly woman who had saved her grandson by cradling him with her body.
