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Search ended at mall wrecked by Japan quake blast / Photo: Yuichi YAMAZAKI - AFP
Search ended at mall wrecked by Japan quake blast
Japanese officials said Saturday they had ended rescue operations at a shopping mall devastated by an explosion following a powerful earthquake that killed at least 36 people.
A total of 12 people were pulled from the site, including seven who were confirmed dead, according to the disaster management office of the Kumamoto region, hit by the 7.1-magnitude jolt on Tuesday.
"We conducted a thorough search over the past two days in collaboration with the fire service, the Self-Defence Forces, and other regional police units," to ensure no one remained missing, a police official told a disaster management meeting on Saturday.
"We found no such individual," he added.
A spokesperson for Aeon, operators of the mall, told AFP that the seven people who died were employees of tenant stores.
On Friday, rescue operations were terminated at a paper factory where a smokestack collapsed.
A total of nine bodies were recovered, and two survivors were extracted.
The quake caused widespread damage in the sweltering southwestern region, flattening homes, damaging bridges, triggering fires and leaving many without electricity and water.
More than 9,000 people, many of them elderly, were still at shelters as of Saturday.
Power cuts were mostly resolved, but 59,000 households still had no water.
Japan is one of the world's most seismically active countries, sitting on top of four major tectonic plates along the western edge of the Pacific "Ring of Fire".
Kumamoto itself was hit by two devastating earthquakes in 2016, which killed 273 people and injured more than 2,800.
F.T. Michaud--SMC
