Mexican bus mudslide rescue winds up with 32 dead

Eloxochitlan (Mexico), July 7: Mexican rescue teams wound up their search today for more victims of a mudslide that sent part of a rain-soaked hill crashing down onto a bus on a winding mountain road.

Some 500 soldiers and emergency workers toiled for nearly two days to dig out 32 bodies crushed in the landslide in the hills of the southern state of Puebla, but said today that sniffer dogs were not detecting any more corpses.

''The rescue dogs are not finding anything more in the zone and it's been decided to stop the work,'' local government spokesman Javier Lopez told Mexican television.

Lopez said there were no more reports of missing people, but rescue workers were going around nearby villages checking to see whether anyone was unaccounted for.

The bus was originally believed to be carrying between 45 and 60 people, mostly from small farming villages around Eloxochitlan, one of Mexico's poorest municipalities.

The victims included four children.

Rescuers had used pick-axes to hack into packed mud and bulldozers to shift boulders and rubble, after the landslide buried the bus under some 23 feet (7 meters) of dirt, about a mile (1.6 km) below the tiny village of Zacacuapan.

The start of the rainy season in Mexico has brought driving rain to many parts of the country, saturating hillsides that are home to farming hamlets. Emergency services warned people to be on the alert for floods and swollen rivers.

Heavy rain in the area around Eloxochitlan had triggered some minor rockfalls in past days, but Wednesday's disaster stirred memories of mudslides in southern Mexico and Central America after the rains of Hurricane Stan in 2005.

Reuters>