Four members of the same family, including two young children, have been killed in a gas explosion that caused their home to partly collapse in southern Italy.
The tragedy had happened in Saviano, a town near Naples, where a two-storey building was destroyed by the blast early Monday morning.
The victims include a boy and a girl, their mother, and their grandmother.
Reports from Italian firefighters revealed that the father and a newborn baby were rescued alive from the rubble.
According to local media, the father was still in serious condition at a hospital in Naples, at the time of filing this report while the baby’s injuries were not life-threatening,
Rescue teams had worked tirelessly throughout the day and into the night to recover the victims, eventually locating the mother at 4:45 pm and the grandmother after midnight.
While the exact cause of the explosion s still under investigation, preliminary theories have pointed to a gas explosion as the cause of the collapse.
Drone footage from the scene showed large holes in the building’s roof, with a large chunk of the structure reduced to rubble.
More than 60 civil protection volunteers were involved in the rescue operation, which kept on for hours with the assistance of sniffer dogs and the fire service had posted images of rescue teams working into the night, carefully filtering through debris to avoid further collapses.
