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| 2003/08/03 |
Russia hospital death toll rises
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08:56:15 �.�
Mozdok, Russia, Aug 3 - More than a thousand rescuers continued early Sunday to remove the rubble of a Russian military hospital after a second night of relentless work, in a desperate search for survivors of a suicide attack that has claimed at least 49 lives.
Rescue workers early Sunday discovered five more bodies amid the debris of the hospital, the head of the Russian Emergencies Ministry's crises department said.
This brought the number of people killed in Friday's attack in southern Russia to at least 49, the Interfax News Agency quoted General Sergei Salov as saying.
Around 1,300 volunteers and rescuers worked to remove the debris, taking five-minute breaks every hour to listen for voices of people still believed to be trapped.
Authorities meanwhile detained the head of the hospital in southern Russia, accusing him of "criminal negligence" in the Friday evening strike on the facility, which had treated Russian soldiers hurt in the guerrilla war with Chechen separatist rebels.
Mozdok is a military nerve center of the four-year Russian military campaign in Chechnya, and authorities have blamed the attack on Chechen extremists.
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