It was delicate work for the searchers to remove the woman’s body from the rubble of a village that effectively ceased to exist in Morocco’s deadliest earthquake in over six decades.
Her 25-year-old fiance Omar Ait Mbarek watched the digging Sunday with his eyes red and full of tears, and surrounded by onlookers, just kilometres from the quake epicentre in the Atlas Mountains.
He was on the phone with her when the shaking started late Friday and he heard kitchen utensils crash to the floor before the line cut out. He knew she was gone.
“What do you want me to say? I’m wounded,” he told AFP after Mina Ait Bihi, weeks from becoming his wife, was carried away in blankets to a makeshift cemetery that already held 68 others.
The men who had carefully used their hands to scoop away the dirt that covered her also found her phone and handed it over to the grieving man.
All around him the village of Tikht, previously home to at least 100 families, was a tangle of timbers, chunks of masonry as well as broken plates, shoes and the occasional intricately patterned rug.বিস্তারিত