At least 18 dead in the Kyushu earthquake as rescuers work through the collapsed mall

Soldiers and emergency workers spent Wednesday searching collapsed houses and a badly damaged shopping centre for trapped survivors, a day after the magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the Kumamoto area on the southern main island of Kyushu. At least 18 people have been killed, including one foreign national, and at least 62 injured, six of them seriously, according to the prefectural government; the tallies have been rising steadily. At the Aeon mall some 3,000 customers were evacuated before a gas explosion in another part of the building, the second floor collapsed, and four deaths have been confirmed at the site while three people are missing.

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