Toddler: Where's my mom?

2004-10-30 10:36

Tokyo - A two-year-old boy who was miraculously rescued from a crushed car after a major earthquake in Japan has begun recounting his ordeal and is asking about his mother who died in the debris, officials said Saturday.

Yuta Minagawa, who was rescued Wednesday after spending four nights trapped in the white mini-van under the rubble of the landslide, seems to have clear memories, said officials at Nagaoka Red Cross Hospital.

But the boy appeared unaware of the deaths of his three-year-old sister and 39-year-old mother, who were also in the vehicle last weekend when the first tremor of 6.8 on the Richter scale struck the central Niigata region.

He has been repeatedly asking hospital staff when he can see his mother and asked on Saturday: "Did my mom die in the hospital?"

Hospital officials would not say whether the news has been broken to him.

When physicians asked Yuta what he drank while he was trapped, he said, "I drank milk. ... I didn't know what to do because the car broke. Please fix it."

Rescuers believe the boy survived by climbing into a small space underneath the wreckage. The body of his 39-year-old mother Takako Minagawa was recovered from the driver's seat on Wednesday.

Rescuers have not been able to pull out the body of Yuta's sister Mayu, still in the back section of the car flattened by heaps of rocks and mud on a riverside road.

The deadly quake and hundreds of aftershocks have killed 36 people, with 2 383 people injured.

Several people died due to shocks from the quake, but many deaths are also attributed to the stress of living at shelters and sleeping inside vehicles.

It was the deadliest to hit tremor-prone Japan since 1995 when 6 433 people were killed in the western city of Kobe.

- AFP