Thirty people are missing and feared dead after an avalanche buried a small hotel in the mountains of central Italy, following a series of earthquakes.
The avalanche covered the four-storey hotel in Abruzzo, an earthquake-hit zone of central Italy that had suffered days of heavy snow, smashing through windows and sending mattresses hundreds of yards down the mountain.
The Italian civil protection agency said it was working to get emergency vehicles to the Hotel Rigopiano, in the town of Farindola, through roads covered in snow, joining initial rescue efforts overnight by alpine rescue squads.
Earlier this morning, Italian news agency Ansa quoted the head of a mountain rescue squad saying “there are many dead”.
The first rescuers reached the hotel on skis at around 4am local time (3am GMT) on Thursday morning, despite the fact that one of only two survivors found so far appears to have raised the alarm on Wednesday afternoon. Video posted online showed rescue workers met with an eerie silence as they searched the four-star spa hotel.
