Man 101, Found Alive After Nepal Quake

Man, 101, Found Alive After Nepal Quake




A 101-year-old man has been pulled alive from the rubble of his home more than a week after the earthquake in Nepal.

Funchu Tamang was rescued on Saturday and is now in hospital in the Nuwakot district, north-west of Kathmandu, with only minor injuries, police official Arun Kumar Singh said.

He said: "He was brought to the district hospital in a helicopter. His condition is stable.

"He has injuries on his left ankle and hand. His family is with him."

Three women were also rescued on Sunday from rubble in Sindupalchowk - one of the districts which was hit worst by the quake.
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Video: Bodies Still Being Found On Everest

One had been buried by a landslide, with the other two were underneath a collapsed building.

Nepal's government ruled out finding any more survivors in Kathmandu on Saturday.

Rescue teams from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and thermal-imaging equipment to find survivors, but outside the capital the search is largely being carried out by police officers and the military.

It comes after Nepal was forced to partially close its only international airport because the single runway has been unable to cope with aid aircraft arriving after last month's earthquake.

Concerns have increased over the speed that aid is getting to people affected by the quake, with people complaining about a lack of temporary shelters as many sleep outside because of the fear of aftershocks causing more buildings to collapse.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said the UK continued to look for any British nationals in need of assistance.

Giving an update on the UK relief effort, Mr Hammond said the authorities had so far helped 550 Britons and had repatriated 350.

As well as providing shelter kits and purification equipment, Britain had flown in heavy lifting equipment to clear the "logistics bottleneck" at Kathmandu airport.

Mr Hammond said: "The problem is we don't have a baseline of how many people were in the country at the time.

"We have been able to eliminate many hundreds of leads that were offered to us, relatives that thought that people might have been in Nepal, we've been able to eliminate the great majority of them from our lists.


"There are now just a very small number of people that we think were in the country that we haven't yet been able to positively identify and the effort is focused on trying to track down whether those people were in Nepal, and if so, where they are now."

The airport in Kathmandu was closed on Sunday to large aircraft, although officials still allowed smaller jets to land.

The UN's head of humanitarian affairs Valerie Amos has said she is "extremely concerned" that Nepal's customs authorities are also slowing the delivery of aid.

She said: "I was extremely concerned to hear reports that customs was taking such a long time.

"He [Prime Minister Sushil Koirala] has undertaken to ensure that happens [speeding up of clearance], so I hope that from now we will see an improvement in those administrative issues."