Myanmar quake victim rescued after 5 days

MANDALAY (AFP) ­— Rescuers on Wednesday pulled a man alive from the rubble five days after Myanmar’s devastating earthquake.

Hopes of finding more survivors are fading, but there was a moment of joy on Wednesday when the man was pulled alive from the ruins of a hotel in the capital Naypyidaw.

The 26-year-old hotel worker was extracted by a joint Myanmar-Turkish team shortly after midnight, the fire service and junta said.

Dazed and dusty but conscious, the man was pulled through a hole in the rubble and put on a stretcher, video posted on Facebook by the Myanmar Fire Services Department shows.

Hundreds of kilometers away, in the Thai capital Bangkok, workers continued to scour a pile of rubble that formed when Friday’s tremors collapsed a 30-story skyscraper.

The structure had been under construction at the time, and its crash buried dozens of builders — few of whom have come out alive.

The death toll at the site has risen to 22, with more than 70 still believed trapped in the rubble.

The shallow 7.7-magnitude earthquake on Friday flattened buildings across Myanmar, killing more than 2,700 people and making thousands more homeless.

Several leading armed groups fighting the military have suspended hostilities during the quake recovery, but junta chief Min Aung Hlaing vowed to continue “defensive activities” against “terrorists.”

United Nations agencies, rights groups and foreign governments have urged all sides in Myanmar’s civil war to stop fighting and focus on helping those affected by the quake, the biggest to hit the country in decades.