A three-month-old baby was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in Colombia after a bystander heard the faint voice of his father calling for help.
The baby, Salomon, was pulled from the remains of the five-storey Torres del Limonar residential complex in Cali, days after a powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the country on Monday.
His father, Juan David Gomez, was also found alive but was trapped under a concrete slab with a bloodied arm.
Bystander Brian Osorio Zuluaga rushed to the site after the earthquake. Searching the rubble, he asked people around him to remain silent and heard a weak voice coming from underneath the debris.
"I'm here. I'm with a baby," Gomez was heard saying. Rescuers and volunteers then began removing the rubble by hand. They eventually spotted the baby's head and carefully pulled him out, reported CNN.
"You can see the baby's little head there — which, at the time, looked sort of purplish because he couldn't breathe," Osorio said. "Once we started removing the rubble, the baby began to… breathe, and his color started to come back," he added.
The search is now on Salomon's mother, Valentina Vanegas Galiano, a 29-year-old architect. She remains trapped under the rubble of the same building along with her younger brother. Her friends, including architects, engineers and construction workers, have joined firefighters and rescue teams in the search.
According to Montoya, Gomez told rescuers that Valentina was around three to four metres ahead of him when the building collapsed. "We do not have an exact confirmed location for Valentina, nor any indication that there is life," her friend Alejandra Montoya told CNN.
The earthquake killed at least 265 people and damaged or destroyed thousands of homes, according to Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella. Nearly 500 people are still reported missing.
More than 20 people were rescued alive from the Torres del Limonar complex during the first 12 hours after the earthquake. Three more people and a dog have also reportedly been found alive since then.
Some communities in Choco, the country's poorest region and one of the areas closest to the earthquake's epicentre, say they are still waiting for help.
Victor Chamapuro, an indigenous leader from the Wounaan Indigenous Reserve of Buenavista, said homes in the community had been destroyed. "Where are we going to sleep now? We have to be alert now, we're sleeping outside," he said.
