Pescara: The rescue operation, which was being watched anxiously throughout Italy, came to a dramatic end: Late Thursday night, the last two bodies were retrieved from the Rigopiano Hotel, which was buried by an avalanche a week before the quake.
In all, 29 were dead and 11 were alive.
The country, however, is now turning to the debate over the effectiveness of the bailout, with many voicing criticism for fatal delays.
In recent days, the search site had become a "storage" of bodies: crews had stopped coming out alive on Saturday, and every retrieval since then was another disappointment.
Among the dead was the hotel owner, Roberto del Rosso. Of those who survived, two are alive by chance because they were outside at the time and the other nine were released from the crews, who were working in adverse conditions.
Prosecution investigation for negligent homicide
The Pescara prosecutor's office has meanwhile launched an investigation into unknowns for multiple negligent homicides in the case.
Briefly, it examines whether the initial calls for help were ignored, whether rescue crews arrived late and whether the hotel should have been evacuated before being hit by the avalanche.
The circumstances and causes of death of each victim are expected to play a role in these - whether they were killed by the avalanche itself or exclusively by their many days of confinement.
Typically, the doctor who called the family of a victim, Gabriele D'Angelo, claims that in the necropsy that he performed it was found that "there are no signs of injuries or suffocation". "In our estimation, if he had been rescued earlier he would probably have lived," he was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency Ansa.
The prosecutor in charge of the case, Christina Tendescini, had made announcements on Wednesday afternoon regarding the course of the judicial investigation.
Clarifying that no case has been filed against a specific person at the moment, the prosecutor underlined that out of all the autopsies that had been done until then (there were six), the cold was not the sole cause of death.
"In some cases, the death was instantaneous due to injury, in others there were different causes, such as injury, hypothermia or suffocation," he said.
"There are no cases in which the cause of death was exclusively hypothermia," the prosecutor stressed, based on the autopsies so far.
Source: philenews.com