by Our Foreign Desk

HOPES were fading yesterday of finding any survivors of last Thursday’s landslide disaster in Guatemala City that killed at least 131 people.

Authorities said that about 300 people might still be missing, but left open the possibility that they may have fled to relatives without contacting authorities or that they were not in the 125 homes buried when the mudslide struck.

Rescue workers pulled more bodies on Sunday from the mound created when a hillside collapsed and covered about 4 acres with mud and dirt up to 15 yards deep.

Volunteer firefighters’ spokesman Julio Sanchez said that 131 bodies had so far been pulled from the mud.

Rescuers reported that the buried dwellings they reached were filled with water.

“The people who could have been alive have drowned,” said services co-ordinator Sergio Cabanas, explaining that rescue personnel would be sent out on foot mainly when a digger turns up a corpse.

“Ninety per cent of it we will do with heavy machinery.”

It was heartbreaking news for those who still held out hope of finding relatives buried by the disaster, which inundated much of the Cambray neighborhood in the suburb of Santa Catarina Pinula.

At an improvised mortuary 82 bodies had been identified and handed over to relatives, said local coroner Dr Carlos Augusto Rodas Gonzalez.

However, other bodies, some of which were found in pieces, remain unidentified.

The list of the identified dead includes at least 26 children and teenagers.