Total of nine people rescued from debris of Rigopiano resort in Gran Sasso mountains, with effort continuing to bring out more survivors

Another four people were pulled alive over Friday night from the rubble of a ski resort in central Italy – bringing to nine the number rescued, more than two days after the hotel was swept down by an avalanche.

The two women and two men were from a group of five whom rescuers had detected beneath the snow and ruins on Friday afternoon. Efforts continued to retrieve any other survivors. The body of a woman was also found.

Earlier on Friday five people – four children and a woman – were pulled alive from the wreckage of the hotel.



Officials said there could be more people alive under the snow and rubble as they could still hear voices.

About 20 of the estimated 35 people who were inside the hotel when the avalanche struck remained missing.

Five bodies have been found since a painstaking and perilous rescue effort began at the site of the Rigopiano hotel in Farindola, in the lower Gran Sasso mountains where an avalanche hit on Wednesday afternoon, dumping more than five metres of snow on the building, which sits 1,200 metres (3,940ft) above sea level.

Most of the guests were thought to have been in or around the hotel’s entrance at the time. They had been waiting for transport to take them home after earthquakes hit the region earlier in the day.

Friday’s rescues meant all four children known to have been in the hotel had been saved, and that a family of four survived the disaster in extraordinary circumstances.

Giampiero Parete escaped the avalanche because he had gone to their car to get headache tablets for his wife shortly before the avalanche hit.

He feared the worst, but his wife Adriana and their son Gianfilipo, seven, were found on Friday morning and guided to safety. As she was lifted out of a tunnel in the snow, the mother could be heard mouthing “my daughter, my daughter”. Just after nightfall it was announced six-year-old Ludovica had also been rescued.

One of the rescuers said the survivors seemed to have been able to light fires to keep themselves warm. “We saw smoke, there were a few small fires in the rubble, and where there is fire there is air so we started to dig,” Marco Bini told Agence France-Presse.



He said six people had been found together in an air pocket, including a mother and child. “They were all in reasonable health, if very cold. The fire will have been using up the oxygen so we were lucky to find them.

“Their faces said it all; it was like they had been reborn. After all the work we are overjoyed to have found them alive.”

Scores of mountain police, firefighters and other emergency personnel had been deployed to the hotel by Friday morning. But progress was proving slow, with rescuers wary of triggering further movements in the snow that could endanger anyone still alive below the rubble.



Days of heavy snowfall had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many central Italian towns and hamlets, and the hotel phones went down early on Wednesday when the first of four earthquakes struck.



They hit near Amatrice, one of the towns destroyed by an earthquake in August that left almost 300 people dead and thousands homeless. Two powerful tremors struck the area in late October, but no one was killed then because the inhabited areas affected had already been evacuated.

It was not clear if the quakes triggered the avalanche, but emergency responders said the force of it demolished a wing of the hotel that faced the mountain and rotated another off its foundations, pushing it downhill.

One of the survivors reported that the guests had all checked out and were waiting for the road to be cleared so they could leave. The snow plough scheduled for mid-afternoon never arrived and the avalanche hit at about 5.30pm.

Prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation, with one line of inquiry being whether the avalanche threat was taken seriously enough, according to Italian media.

Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report