LIMA, Peru (AFP) – The death toll in a landslide in northern Peru has risen to eight with the recovery of a young child’s body, officials said Sunday.
“With deep regret, I want to inform you that we have recovered the body of a child under three years of age in the town of Retamas,” said Defense Minister Jose Luis Gavidia.
At least three other victims of Tuesday’s landslide were children, Gavidia said earlier.
Civil defense officials said search operations were called off Sunday, with the bodies of all eight missing people now recovered, and workers were turning to clean-up operations.
The landslide in Retamas, a remote mining town around 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of Lima, buried a half-dozen homes.
Several bodies were found in a market in the path of an avalanche of mud provoked when a hillside collapsed in torrential rains.
This was not Retamas’s first brush with tragedy. A 2009 landslide killed 13 people.
Such landslides are common in the Andean regions of Peru and other South American countries where towns often rise on risky hillsides.
© Agence France-Presse