The death toll from a powerful earthquake in the southern Philippines rose to seven on Saturday as rescuers continued to search for two people missing in a landslide.
The magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck the island region of Mindanao on Friday afternoon caused part of the ceiling of a shopping mall in the city of General Santos to collapse, causing people to flee into the streets.
Debris falling from the mall killed one woman and nineteen other people needed treatment, local police chief Ari Noel Cardos told AFP.
Authorities on Friday reported the deaths of a couple shaken by the collapse of a concrete wall outside a store in the same city, where about thirty students were also treated for breathing difficulties.
Another person was killed when a steel structure collapsed in Glan township in Sarangani province, Paul Mesalido, a police officer, told AFP.
In a village four hours’ drive from Glan, firefighters searched the rubble on Saturday for two missing family members.
“The village chief told us that a mother and her child were trapped in the rubble,” rescuer Daniel Nocos told AFP.
Manila’s disaster management agency reported a second death in Glan and another in the neighboring municipality of Malapatan, but gave no details.
In the neighboring province of Davao Occidental, an elderly man was killed when a rock rolled down a hill near his home, said Patrick Laurente, a police officer.
Earthquakes occur daily in the Philippines because the archipelago lies on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a zone of intense seismic and volcanic activity that stretches from Japan to the Pacific Basin through Asia in the southeast.